


Of All the Graves

by Letterblade



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: (at least a little), (at least by Voltron standards), Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Minor Character Death, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, High-Concept Sci-Fi, Jewish Pidge | Katie Holt, Lost Civilization, Nature Boy Keith, Other characters in background, VLDgen, Wilderness Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-18
Updated: 2018-07-18
Packaged: 2019-06-10 04:41:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 25,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15283875
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Letterblade/pseuds/Letterblade
Summary: All Pidge needed was a flower. That was it. Just one little flower with one little complex and hard-to-synthesize organic catalyst growing in its stamens. It couldn't bethathard to find, could it? Even if it's landed her here, stranded deep behind Galra lines, bushwhacking through an alien jungle with the second most socially awkward member of Team Voltron for company. Second only to herself, of course.She's looking for a flower. Not staggering wonder and tragedy, the greatest intellectual challenge she's ever faced, or things she has in common with Keith Kogane. But if she can survive this, she might just find all of them.





	Of All the Graves

**Author's Note:**

> This was my jump-in-off-the-waitlist chance to write for the Voltron Gen Reverse Mini-Bang, a chance I gleefully took, and this event was a blast. Rounds of thanks: to the most excellent mods of this bang; to Mllelaurel for beta reading; and, much less personally, to the _Horizon Zero Dawn_ team at Guerilla Games, as while this fic is not an HZD fusion, it owes a significant creative debt to that amazing game.
> 
> And most importantly, many, many thanks to my prompter and partner in this bang, [kyuofcosmic](https://www.deviantart.com/kyuofcosmic). Talented, thoughtful, incredibly gracious about all the last-minute tweaks as I pounded out most of this draft three days before deadline, and did I mention talented? Go check out their work!

The thing about having the lab in the Green Lion’s bay is that she’s always watching Pidge work.

Which is—nice, honestly. At first it was just ‘cause there was this convenient large empty space where nobody was going to step on her toes, but once she started settling in and also getting used to the whole maybe-sentient Clark’s-law space lion thing, it became pretty comforting to have Green’s subliminally-alive bulk behind her as she worked. Less lonely. So sure, she’s set everything back up in the temporary hangar bay on Olkarion while they rebuild the Castle. She’d always study or build hobby projects or whatever with an open door policy back home, so Mom or Dad or Matt could come in whenever, even if it always pissed her off when some asshole leaned over her bench at school and asked what the nerd was up to, and having Green here feels like that.

She used to wonder if it was just her imagination. Not so much after their first adventure on Olkarion.

Not that she has a control circlet for the lion like she did for the Olkari mechs, or any way of directly communicating with her. Frustrating sometimes. So whatever Green might be thinking at any given moment is pretty much in the realm of Pidge’s Overactive Imagination.™

Until the ZHC.

It had started as one of Hunk’s fidget-projects, trying to improve the goo dispenser for the Castle of Lions II, and then had turned into a much bigger food replicator project after they’d watched some bootleg _Trek_ together, and one thing had kind of led to another and she had maybe spent three nights trawling her disorganized emergency download of the Castle’s computer banks with her slowly deepening knowledge of Altean, and there was an old blueprint which called for an extremely complex organic chemical as a catalyst and didn’t give a source, and Hunk was extremely nervous that if he asked Coran it might involve collecting the strange gastrointestinal secretions of another space animal. A legitimate concern, given the alarming amount of Altean technology that runs on the strange gastrointestinal secretions of a space animal. Anyway, they’d started calling the stuff ZHC, Zappy for short, and Pidge had absconded to her lab to at least give it a _try_ before asking Coran.

For professional pride. And science. And because she’s been meaning to learn more about chemical synthesis for a while, because she’s still learning her way around a lot of more organic stuff, but chemistry is easy, right? Chemistry is just numbers.

And acid.

And runaway exothermic reactions.

And part of her work table is never going to look the same.

She’s nowhere close to ZHC and has had to vent the bay at least once, but at least Green’s coat of paint is unmarred.

It’s been an adventure, but she hates failure enough that she’s had to lie on the floor for at _least_ ten doboshes, because this is getting a little humiliating.

Which is when there’s a strange, chuffy rumbling noise that seems to fill the space and also comes from far above her.

“Bweh?” Pidge says, because her throat is still a little sore from the offgassing that had made her vent the bay.

Green chuffs again. Her eyes are lit.

Pidge shakes herself and scrambles up to sitting. “What is it, girl?”

The lion shifts her front paws on the deck with a soft, massive screech of metal on metal, lowers her head, and opens her jaws.

Pidge gets her feet under her, brows furrowing. “This is new. Please don’t be haunted and fly off with me or something?” She pauses, staring up at her lion. Then grabs her armor gauntlet off the bench. For the computer. _Just_ in case. “Okay, what’s up?” She pats the smooth, thrumming metal of her jaw before she trots up the ramp.

Green closes behind her, rolls the seat up to the consoles, and lights up.

There’s a picture of a flower on one of the tactical screens. No, a model, incredibly detailed. Rotating. It’s purple-pinkish, with foliage so dark green it’s almost black. It’s a strange, elaborately ruffled affair. An analysis ring appears, zoomed in on one of the thin, orange-cream structures in the center, and the pop-out displays—the formula for ZHC.

Pidge squeaks. “You know where to get it?”

There’s not particularly an answer, but really, it’s kind of a rhetorical question.

“Is it just concentrated in those stamens? I suppose we’d need a lot of flowers.” She pauses. “Unless it’s a giant space flower.” She reaches for the comm panel. “Hey, Hunk, Green’s showing me where to get ZHC.”

It takes Hunk’s line a moment to pick up, and when he does, a mouse face appears in his screen before he peers over, elbows deep in a machine casing. “Pidge, why is your face blue?”

Pidge pauses, brow furrowed. “My face is blue?” She pokes her cheek. Looks at her hands.

Hunk grins, radiant, in exactly that way which makes her doubt him. “Oh yeah yeah, you’ve got like an imprint of your safety goggles and everything. What’s Green showing you? Green’s showing you stuff now?”

“Yeah!” Pidge pats Green’s console. “It’s in the stamens of some sort of flower—she’s showing me a botanical diagram.”

Hunk’s brows lower thunderously. “So it’s space saffron. Well, that’s gonna be a pain in the ass. Does she know where it grows?”

“Do you know where it grows, girl?” Pidge asks, swiping at the icons around the edge of the screen to try to fish up more information. A starmap pops up. Not a galaxy she knows well, but still. “Sweet, I’ve got a starmap.” She calls up another com window, this time to the temporary bridge. It’s a floor under construction, but some of the key consoles are already installed, including the control pillars for the teludav. Because of _course_ the teludav was the first thing they built, so they can open wormholes for lions and supply ships even if they don’t have a Castle to fly.

The only person there is Romelle at one of the secondary consoles, frowning and poking her way through holo-screens, because she’s still learning to use computers, because apparently that was not a piece of Altean culture Lotor felt was worth teaching his pet colony.

“Pidge?” she asks, carefully pulling the call over to her console. And managing to invert the image so Pidge is staring at her lap. “Wait, don’t tell me, I solved this one already…there.” Back to her face and her slightly sheepish smile. “Do you need something?”

“To talk to Allura and Shiro, I think, I’m gonna be going on an errand. But first.” Pidge checks around the bridge covertly. Romelle’s honest, right? “Is my face blue,” she mutters.

“No…?” Romelle’s ear twitches once in confusion, reminding Pidge _yet again_ that they have been unduly robbed of phoebs of Allura doing cute things with her ears because apparently she thinks it’s déclassé or something. “Who said it was?”

“Hunk,” Pidge says fondly. “He’s full of shit.”

Romelle’s serious focus cracks on a smile. “I _see_. You’re right about that. It’s not blue, it’s magenta.”

“Nooooo,” Pidge groans. “That’s worse.”

Romelle gets the rest of the team’s attention eventually, and tells them what’s going on, and Allura grabs an Olkari floating platform down to the bridge-in-progress.

“Wait whaaaa,” comes a Lancey squawk from somewhere. “Are you going on a date with your lion? When do I get to go on a date with my lion? Allura can I go on a date with my lion?”

“Why are you asking me?” Allura says primly. “That would be at the Red Lion’s discretion. Pidge, could you transfer those coordinates to the bridge?”

“On it. Is the teludav still taking a while to spin up?”

“Unfortunately yes. Coran says it’ll be a few quintants yet until the drive core is functional enough to allow for immediate wormholing.”

Coran and Krolia trickle down to the bridge side by side, both sparking slightly like they’ve been working hard in the coalescing drive core of the new Castle, and both look up at the starmap Allura’s loading on the holo-screen.

Coran’s eyes widen.

Krolia frowns. “That’s deep in Galra space. The core galaxy of the empire.”

Coran and Allura trade a glance, and Coran makes significant quirk of his eyebrows, and Allura’s face is very tightly contained.

“Then don’t go alone.” Shiro strides in after Coran and Krolia, his new Olkari right arm still tucked in a sling as it takes root in his nervous system, gradual and painless.

Pidge shakes her head. “I can always cloak. It’d be a lot more dangerous to take another lion with me. And I’ve been alone in Galra-controlled space before. I’ll be fine.”

“I’ll go.” It always takes Pidge a moment, these days, to recognize Keith’s voice. Two years away changed him. It’s subtle, she feels stupid, but _still_. “I’ve got a Blade transponder now. Quantum entangled. A few short signals will go completely undetected even from the most tightly controlled system, and we know Sendak’s attention is on the frontier right now.”

“I work better alone,” Pidge protests, before she can think better of it.

“Take Keith,” Shiro says, warm but firm. “There’s no need to do risky missions alone right now. Especially when we can’t immediately give you a wormhole for extraction.”

“I’ll stay out of your way,” Keith says, a touch dry. His visual isn’t coming up, but she hears some rustling in the background, and then the familiar click of an armor breastplate sealing. Right—she should maybe go change. “I know better than to touch science. But I’ll have your back.”

“Right,” Pidge sighs.

 

❧

 

By the time Pidge has coaxed Green to remanifest the passenger’s chair and changed into her armor, Keith is waiting by the ramp in full armor, space wolf at his heels. His Marmora blade’s in the small of his back, so she’s guessing he’s left the black bayard with Shiro. At least the space wolf is cool, Pidge tells herself. And this shouldn’t take that long. Grab an alien flower twenty-two galaxies away, get out through a controlled manifestation of theoretical physics, go back to building a spaceship. Occasionally Pidge has to stop and remind herself how crazy awesome her life is.

The com window to the bridge is still open in one corner of the console as Allura and the others busy themselves spinning up the teludav. Keith settles in her passenger seat. Ticks pass in silence.

“Pidge,” Keith says eventually. He’s not looking quite at her, but at her console two inches right of her head, brows furrowed. “I didn’t understand everything I heard from the others, but did you really build something to use against Shiro, way back at the beginning?”

Pidge feels a hard knot in her belly and mutes their microphone so Allura can’t hear them. “Did you come along just to chew me out or something?”

“What—” She hears Keith take a breath. “No. I just need to understand.”

Great, Pidge thinks. Keith’s one of the ones who never even _tries_ to understand the science, and also he is how he is about Shiro. Well, she can find a flower with a teammate being pissed at her the whole time, she supposes. “Look. There’s been a Galra computer in his brain since day one. The arm doesn’t just run itself, it’s hardwired right into his central nervous system. I never thought _Shiro_ would betray us. Not since I learned why he attacked my brother.” She dares a look at Keith at this point—he doesn’t look angry, just thoughtful, at least as much as she can tell with him, especially now two years a stranger.

His space wolf whuffs and lays its head on his knee, and Keith settles a gloved hand between its ears. “Were you always afraid something like that could happen?” he asks quietly.

“…yeah.” Pidge sighs. “I wasn’t _sure_ it could shut out his higher functioning, but human brains get damn weird sometimes, and I’m not a neuroscientist, and it’s not like Earth neuroscience can account for what happens when you have a chip as powerful as my laptop fused into your gray matter. So yeah, I wrote a virus that could terminate any code running on or created by the arm’s operating system.” She swallows. “I never thought I’d have to use it. I _really_ thought I’d never have to use it in the Castle’s system, I figured I’d upload it into the arm if he went all crazy on us and sort it out from there…”

“What would that have done to him?” Keith asks.

“Bricked all the Galra hardware in his system so it couldn’t override his brain any more. He’d be himself, I’d have to write new firmware so he could move his arm again, we’d get on with our lives. Unless the arm actually damaged his brain when it took him over, but the damage would already have been done, and that _didn’t_ happen, that was just me running worst-case scenarios.”

Keith’s quiet for a long moment, and Pidge risks another look, but she can’t read him. “It was the arm,” he says eventually. “He stopped when I cut it off.”

“Oh,” Pidge says, because okay, she’d kinda figured, but Keith can’t have been happy about actually doing it. “At least the main controls were in the arm and not the implant. Good.”

“Did you know the arm went all the way up?”

“Yeah.” Pidge looks back to the console, the knot in her stomach easing a little. Hard part’s over, maybe? “There was metal all through his right shoulder girdle. Hunk said they pretty much had to reinforce it like that. I mean, the arm’s metal, it’s super-strong, he would’ve pulverized his shoulder if it just ended at his bicep.”

“He made an energy sword,” Keith says, after another moment of silence. “From his hand.”

“Yikes.” She bites her lip. “I’d wondered, when I first did the deep scans, if it had more functions than I realized, but I didn’t know enough about Galra hardware to figure them out back then. And he never let us do another examination that thorough. He’s always been cagey about it.”

“I don’t blame him,” Keith says, a bit sharp.

“Me neither,” Pidge says, a bit defensive.

The space wolf whuffs.

“You could figure it out enough to write something to attack it, but not to know what it did?” Keith asks after a moment.

The hard knot in Pidge’s gut reforms a little. “It’s a lot easier to destroy something than to analyze or repair or create. Goes for code just like everything else.”

“Paladins,” comes Allura’s voice from the console, slightly tinny, and slightly frustrated, like she’s called more than once. “The teludav is ready.”

“Right,” Pidge says, and reaches for the control bars to bound into orbit.

 

❧

 

The wormhole spits them out on the heliopause of a solar system.

Keith falls silent, and Pidge takes stock. The Green Lion hangs in space, oddly motionless for a moment, and there’s a strange, icy trickle down Pidge’s spine, but she doesn’t pay it much attention because she’s too busy staring at her screens.

“Whoa,” she says quietly.

“What is it?” Keith asks.

Pidge frowns, flipping through screens of more detailed readings. “The gravitational forces in this system are…odd. I don’t know why they’re behaving how they are.”

“It’s a binary system,” Keith offers, which is honestly more than she expected from him.

“Sure. And that one big outer gas giant is doing what big outer gas giants do. There’s more mass in that asteroid belt than usual, like a whole planet’s worth of mass.” She surveys the rest of the system: binary suns, one big gas giant, one generously endowed asteroid belt, and a few smaller rocky planets, one inside the asteroid belt and two outside in close orbits. “It’s those smaller planets that are strange. Especially that one.” She zooms in, runs a few more scans. “The gravitational fields they generate don’t correlate to their mass.”

“Is it safe?” Keith asks after a moment.

Pidge shrugs. “Probably. It’s not Thayserix or that quantum abyss your mom was telling me about. It’s also…” She frowns at her screens. “Well, I guess we’re going to that planet with the weirdest gravity, because it’s also the only place in this system with any life. I’m not reading any Galra ships around, at least.”

Keith is silent, and there’s the faint rustle of his space wolf picking its head up off his lap. Pidge glances over her shoulder to see its ears pricking, then flicking back. Keith rests a hand in its ruff, eyes narrowed.

“What’s up with your wolf?” she asks as she kicks Green into gear, heading for the little planet with the life signs.

“Something feels weird about this place.” Keith lets out one hissing breath. “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling.”

“Well, maybe he’s sensitive to gravitational disturbances—who knows about teleporting space wolves.” She pauses. “He? She?”

Keith shrugs. “I found him on the back of a space whale, he didn’t exactly come with a field guide. I go with him because of his name, I guess.”

“I don’t actually know his name.”

“Yorak.”

“…Yorak.”

“It’s…what Mom wanted to call me.” He sounds a little sheepish. “Before Dad talked her out of it.”

Pidge snorts. “Seriously? Is it like Galra for Keith?”

“Not—exactly? It’s a family name on her father’s side, she said. But I’m kinda glad he talked her out of it.”

“Yeah, being called Yorak isn’t gonna do you any favors.”

“School was bad enough.”

“Ugh,” Pidge groans. “I know what you mean.”

Keith’s brows knit. “Really? Aren’t you a super genius?”

“Who likes a super genius,” Pidge mutters.

“…fair enough,” Keith says quietly after a moment of silence.

Pidge maps an approach through the odd gravity, then grumbles at another pane of her console. “I can’t get a clear reading on atmosphere toxicity. We might want to keep our helmets on down there.”

Keith just nods and flicks on the faceplate of his helmet with a thought. They’re not that close to the planet yet, but they’re starting to get a magnificent view of the binary stars, one a sunlike yellow-white, one a venerable red dwarf being gently chewed upon by its younger. Maybe in another few million years, it’ll be full-blown solar cannibalism, but now it’s just a fine sheet of bright gas.

Pidge starts loading up her usual algorithm for finding good landing zones.

The screen flickers under her hand.

Yorak growls once, low and thin, and Keith hisses, and the Green Lion bucks under her. The strange chill down her spine turns into a stab of—fear? Betrayal? “What’s wrong, girl?” Pidge pulls up the diagnostic screen with a flick of her finger.

Everything’s turning red.

Power. They’re losing core power with a terrifying speed. It shouldn’t even be _possible_ for the lions, not without taking a massive hit—they generate power too fast for that, however they do it.

“Shit,” Pidge hisses through her teeth, and tries to reroute. Stall. _Anything_. Screens flick out one by one. “Come on, girl, come on, you can do it—”

“We’re off course,” Keith says, low and sharp. “I think local gravity’s fluctuating.”

“Oh no you don’t,” Pidge growls, and yanks the control bars hard, trying to pull up, because she may not have Keith’s crazy ace pilot instincts, but she can certainly see a collision course when it’s right in front of her face. Her gut’s churning, and she can’t tell whether it’s her own fear, some strange leakage from her lion, the tides of gravity.

Green groans beneath her, and the control bars slide too easy, like they’re not in gear, and the planet fills the viewscreen like a churning green wall.

Then the screen itself goes dead, just the blank metal inside Green’s head as the roar of hitting atmosphere flares up along her hull.

 

❧

 

“You know what the stupidest thing is?” Pidge says, kicking a very thick vine.

Keith doesn’t particularly answer, just makes a questioning noise from where he’s sorting through the lion’s emergency kit for what’s worth bringing with them.

“If I was Olkari, I could fix her just with this.” She kicks it again for good measure. “This place is _teeming_ with life. But I’m not telekinetic, I don’t have an interlink, I can’t _reach_ it like Ryner would…”

Keith surfaces with a full knapsack which he slings over his shoulder like it weighs nothing. Maybe it does, maybe he’s just being Keith, there’s no telling. “It’ll be okay,” he says, surprisingly calm. “How far away is the source of the dampening field?”

“Thirty, forty kilometers if my readings are right.” Pidge sighs and leaves off the spite-kicking, taking a moment to pick her way across the crater of forest wreckage to pet Green’s cold, inert nose jammed into the dirt. The poor thing’s not exactly had a dignified landing. “We’ll get you back online, girl. Promise. Just gotta go shut down whatever did this.”

“Not going to be an easy trip in this kind of terrain,” Keith says, surveying the knotted jungle around them. “How long are the days here?”

“About eighteen vargas. A little shorter than Earth’s.” Pidge pulls up a solar model on her wrist computer. Keith makes a few vague hand-measuring motions at the sky. “We’re on the summer side, at least, and the binary stars will extend usable daylight by nearly a varga on each end. Full dark in about seven vargas, sunrise eight vargas after that.”

“It’s going to be dark before then as far as we’re concerned.”

Pidge blinks at him.

“In a forest this thick. It’s not like we’re in open desert. Dusk and dawn will be slow. We’ll want to look for a campsite in about five vargas.” He pauses, leans down to run one hands through the dirt for some reason. “At least we won’t be lacking shelter if it gets cold.”

“Ugh,” Pidge says after a long silence. “Are we really gonna be here overnight?”

“Forty kilometers in this kind of forest?” Keith readjusts the strap of their supply bag once, then tucks his knife in easy reach and starts picking his way to the edge of their crater. “We’ll be lucky to make it before sunset tomorrow.”

“Ugggghhhhhhhh.” Pidge follows him, stomach sinking. This is really happening. Like summer camp, but in full armor on an alien planet, and without cabins, and she’s going to have to _pee_ in the _woods_. “At least we can keep an eye out for those flowers on the way.”

“Yeah.” Keith seems strangely okay with all this. “Can you check for poison with your suit’s computer?”

“Don’t see why not.” Yorak trots out ahead of them, tail waving majestically in the thick jungle air. “Is it going to be safe to send a signal to the Castle? They think this is just a fetchquest, not a camping trip.”

“I already did.”

They trudge for a few minutes in silence. At the edge of the hole Green punched in the jungle canopy, the great trees close over them, and Pidge realizes what Keith meant about it getting dark earlier than the solar model might indicate. Especially with just the red dwarf in the sky. The undergrowth closes around them, thick and wild, and the world pretty much narrows to Keith’s back glinting red and white in the gloom as he extends his blade to serve as a machete.

“Okay,” Pidge says after a little while of their painfully slow hack, trudge, hack, trudge through the jungle. “I admit it. I’m glad you’re here.”

Keith pauses for a moment, then finishes wrangling a quite spiky-looking vine and hands it back to her.

“You can say I told you so,” Pidge adds, ducking under the vine and letting it fall behind them.

Keith makes one soft huff. “It’s okay.” Then, after more trudging silence, “I…know I’m not always the best at showing it.” He’s sort of determinedly not looking back at her. “But you’re all important to me. I’m glad I’m back. And I’m gonna try to do better this time.”

“Oh,” Pidge says, a little soft, without meaning to.

Keith’s shoulders see to hunch a little, and he cuts an unyielding vine in two with a particularly resounding _thwack._

 

❧

 

Not long after that, they stumble upon the first carcass.

It’s large, maybe four-legged, and it’s hard to tell much more because there’s a pack of spiny, vicious-looking dog-things clustered around it, tearing out the guts with very sharp teeth. Then one of them snarls at another. Then a fight breaks out, brief, fatal, and the pack of scavengers sets upon their fallen own with equal gusto.

“Eeegh,” says Pidge, eloquent.

Yorak sniffs the air, ears swiveling, and Keith sets a hand in his ruff. “Let’s go around,” he says, very quietly.

“Aren’t we going to need food sometime before tomorrow?” Pidge asks, not that she exactly wants to fight a pack of coyote-hedgehogs.

“Not worth fighting a pack of coyote-hedgehogs. Especially since neither of us has a gun. Besides, we don’t know how long the big carcass been dead, and scavengers aren’t always the safest to eat.”

Pidge wrinkles her nose. “Fair enough.”

 

❧

 

After another varga or so, and few more carcasses either skeletonized or actively being scavenged, Pidge finally realizes another thing that’s damn unsettling about the place.

“Keith,” she says slowly. “Have you heard any birds?”

Keith shakes his head. “No. Just those hedgehog-coyotes baying at each other in the distance.” He’s quiet for a moment, then, “Nothing like squirrels or mice either. No small animals. No bugs. No prey.”

Pidge frowns. “What about those corpses we keep finding?”

“A couple different species, I think, but they all have sharp teeth.” He pulls down a tree branch with leaves the width of her palm, set through with jagged rips. “Whatever’s eating this—sharp teeth.”

Yorak’s ears go back, and a low, thin growl trickles from his jaw.

“Also I think something’s following us,” Keith says, like he’s reporting the weather.

Pidge stiffens.

“Don’t run.”

“Warn a guy,” Pidge mutters, and drops a hand to her thigh sheath to carefully summon her bayard.

“I did?” Keith says, nonplussed, and puts himself back to back with Pidge with a motion so fluid she barely realizes it until the supply bag is bouncing against her thrusters.

There’s enough time for her nerves to ratchet up to the roof. Canopy. Whichever. She and Keith always had a pretty good groove in battle—for all that they got their asses kicked, she kind of cherishes the memory of skirmishing with Ulaz, because communicating with a glance had only ever happened with Matt before. But he’s been two years away and she doesn’t know where his head is at.

Well, when has she ever known where Keith’s head was at?

A branch cracks.

Keith jerks his head over his shoulder. An exact direction. Pidge thinks very hard about her bayard being a trap wire, puts her faith in Altean psychoreactive tech, and fires once.

Green light anchors in one tree and the arrowhead slides back down it to the handle. She fires again, and it tightens into an electrified line, and the arrowhead blinks back to her.

She and Keith share a grin, and he falls into a ready crouch, sword up. Yorak’s hackles flare.

Pidge thinks she can spot a shape in the undergrowth. A rather alarmingly large one.

“You go high, I go low,” Keith murmurs.

She takes a moment to scope out the vertical arena. Still a lot of hanging vines, thick branches. Not going to be easy to maneuver. But she’s still got the grappling hook, and Keith is well-equipped to hamstring things.

A spiky, green-mottled thing roughly the shape of a velociraptor cranes out of the shadows of the jungle. The shape—not the size. Much more Jurassic Park size than actual real velociraptor size. Even bigger, maybe.

“Oh,” Pidge starts.

It steps over the tripwire without even noticing it.

“… _quiznak_.”

Keith explodes into motion, charging low and liquid for the hamstring strike, and Pidge grapples herself up and out of its reach. Eyes good, teeth bad. There are a _lot_ more teeth than eyes.

The luxite blade skids off its scales. The branch Pidge has picked for an anchor point cracks, spilling pretty much right down on the dino in a crash of broken wood. She hisses, scrabbles for purchase. The dino screes, bucks. The energy blade of her bayard wedges between scales, but doesn’t seem to hit flesh. She grits her teeth, dumps voltage into it.

Sparks scatter across its scales.

“Rude!” she yelps, just as a second buck jars her loose. She slides off, reels in the dirt for a moment from the bone-juddering backlash of her own shock. Because for fuck’s sake, an electrically resistant dinosaur, how much ruder can you _get?_

It’s snarling now, riled up, stomping in a circle. Her earlier tripwire has disappeared, which is good, because Keith is weaving like smoke around its legs, trying to distract it or find a soft spot. “Pidge?”

“I’m good, I’m good…” She forces a deep breath. The big high branches are more rickety than they look. If she can bring enough of them down on its head—

Keith is too busy parrying a clawed foot to notice the heavy tail heading right for him.

“Keith, tail—!”

It’s too late. He goes flying. Smacks head-first into a tree trunk twice as broad as him and there’s a horrible cracking noise. The faceplate of his helmet flickers, shorts out of existence. Damn it, this thing is _juggling_ them, this is embarrassing.

Keith rolls to his feet.

Then makes a deathly rattle and staggers.

Pidge’s mind goes white at that sound. She’s seven and Matt’s miscalculated with the yellow jacket nest in the garage and is gasping for air on the concrete floor as his throat closes up. She’s seventeen and an alien dino-thing is barreling for her—

Yorak bays and bulls into its side in a blur of claws and fangs.

It’s going to have to be enough to stall it, because Keith’s dying.

Pidge fires in blind hurry, laying down another tripwire between Keith and the dino, higher this time. And hopes the thing doesn’t shove poor Yorak into it. Five ticks gone.

Keith manages to croak something that sounds like _what the hell_ , and fumbles with his helmet with his off hand, still clutching his blade.

“The bag,” Pidge says, rushing up. “The bag.”

Keith swallows hard, and makes another horrid choking noise, and brings his knife up.

“You’re in anaphylatic shock you _idiot_ , there’s epinephrine in the bag, give it to me.”

Keith’s eyes widen. They’re red-rimmed already. Tinged with purple. He croaks again. Staggers harder.

Pidge catches him as he goes down—he’s heavier than he looks, solid wiry muscle, and there’s an undignified tumble into the leaf litter, and then she’s rustling frantically through the bag with one hand and staring at her wrist com’s atmospheric analysis with the other. Still no toxins identified. An allergy, not poison. “Shit,” she says, between her teeth, and “shit” again, because she has obnoxious allergies out the yin-yang and she doesn’t know the chances that whatever Keith’s choking on isn’t going to do the same damn thing to her.

A hypospray. Except it’s a blood clotter, not the epinephrine, that would probably kill him _faster_.

Keith’s eyes are starting to swell. He claws at his throat, dislodging his useless helmet. Yorak bays; the dino hisses.

It shouldn’t be happening this _fast_. She’d run up to Matt’s room. Fumbled in his bookbag from school. Found his epipen. Tripped over something on the way. He was still breathing when she’d gotten back. Barely, but breathing. Keith’s rattling like death. Faster than—

Faster than a human enters anaphylaxis.

It’s the closest thing she has to proof that she might survive this, so she unseals her own helmet and jams it over his head.

The first breath she takes of this damn planet is like standing in an entire grove of jizzing spring maples, and she almost immediately feels a tremendous sneeze building, but the tightness is in her sinuses, not in her throat.

Keith somehow manages to snarl something that looks like _no_ with his purpling lips.

Hypospray. Painkiller. Pidge curses, sneezes three times in a row. The dino staggers into the tripwire, jitters hard, and Yorak teleports free just in time, reappearing just behind her and Keith with a growl.

Hypospray. Epinephrine. _Finally_.

Pidge tears off the armor on Keith’s right thigh, whispers _blue to the sky_ even though the whole thing’s blue and shiny because it’s space epinephrine, and slams it home.

Keith jolts, spasms. Pidge leans her weight on the hypospray to keep it in place as it squeezes the full dose into his muscle mass.

The dark undersuit cleverly seals itself again as she finishes the injection, and then there’s a snarl behind her, and she whirls and flings the empty bit of plastic into the dinosaur’s face before she even has a moment to think about it.

It is, unsurprisingly, not fazed.

Pidge reels in her bayard, eyes stinging in the pea-soup jungle air, and looks up at the annoyingly large _thing_ shaking off a massive electric shock, and really, _really_ hopes she doesn’t have to solo it. For a moment, she can’t spot Yorak. Then he blinks back into existence beside her, a few spatters of something glowing blue like blood behind him.

“Come and get it,” Pidge snaps, and fires her bayard up, reeling herself into the sky. It takes the bait, swipes, but it’s not the fastest thing in the world, and Pidge escapes—only to be swatted off course by a vine. She swings back down against a tree trunk, reeling. The dino lunges, jaws wide, as she dangles with her shoulder aching, and she cuts the bayard cord at the last minute, drops ten feet from the fangs about to close over her, rolls. Sneezes. “I _hate_ this planet.”

“Yeah it’s.” Keith’s voice is scraped raw, tinny through the helmet’s speakers. Something red and white is wriggling in the dim forest—he’s maybe not on his feet yet, but moving. He doesn’t finish the sentence, just gives an expressive grunt as Pidge dodges grasping claws. The blade comes whirring to the dino’s face, moving like it has a mind of its own, barely missing an eye. “Damn it.”

It thrashes. Yorak goes for a hamstring, and it turns, and the heavy tail sends Pidge flying.

Keith’s saying something far away. Her eyes sting. She’s groping through rotting muck, ears ringing. Gloved fingers shrieking against metal—

— _metal?_

She risks a single second, blinking through histamines, to scan. The angled, overgrown cliff she’s been slammed against isn’t a rock formation—it’s metal underneath. Some corrosion, complex alloys, but there’s only one thing she needs to know.

“Drive it to me!” she shouts, for whatever good it does. Keith’s still on his ass, she doesn’t know if Yorak can understand her. “Come on! Come here, you big scaly asshole!” She jumps up and down. “Come on, charge me, holy shit you’re charging me, come on!” She scrabbles a little to one side, chances one look around the terrain, and in two more big strides, the beast closes the distance.

Pidge fires her bayard into the metal cliff. Rolls, spinning out the cord. Slithers beneath the dino’s tail by a hair and bolts, then slams the handle of her bayard into the wall again, lacing the beast by a single thin line of desperation.

Then she retracts the cord with all the power the bayard has.

Then she dumps a couple dozen _thousand_ volts into it.

The dino staggers, smacks flat against the metal wall, and the electricity flows. It had shaken off a shock before, sure. But she’s not here to shock it. She’s here to superheat the metal surface it’s pressed against.

Whatever sort of scales this thing is wearing, they smell pretty goddamn awful once they start to burn. So, Pidge realizes, does her glove. She yelps, pulls back, hopes that the dino is at least something close to dead.

Keith staggers up, leaning on Yorak, neither of them looking their best.

“Welcome to the dino bar and grill,” Pidge says, a little giddy from adrenaline. “Can I take your order?”

 

❧

 

It’s not, of course, _quite_ that easy. First there’s trying not to start _too_ much of a fire—fortunately the turgid forest doesn’t burn easy. Then there’s the curious pack of hedgehog-coyotes circling them as Keith uses a priceless psychoreactive antique to crack the scales and joint off a foreclaw, well crisped and more than enough to feed all three mouths until it goes bad. They wind up legging it after dropping a very large tree branch behind them to try to scare off the scavengers, right along that sloping cliff. Which goes on. And on.

There’s a hole in it, and no scavengers in sight, and the both of them lean against it heaving air. Neither of them is bothering to talk, but they both keep looking at the hole, and yeah, Pidge is pretty sure they’re gonna check it out.

The first thing she says when she can breathe enough to talk, though, is, “Let me check that bag again. I usually keep antihistamines in Green’s medkit.”

“Mm,” Keith says, and unslings it. They crouch to rummage, and as she goes through the medkit, he pulls out a bit of line and ties the foreclaw to the strap for easier carrying. Then he touches the side of his green-accented helmet with a strange, quiet cast to his face. “How…how did you know you’d survive?”

“I took a guess.” He’s still looking at her oddly, so Pidge bites her lip and keeps talking, which is a nice distraction from her burning eyes. “I know what anaphylactic shock looks like in humans, and it was different. Faster. Bits of you were turning purple. So I figured it was a Galra thing and that I had a chance of immunity.”

“How do you…?”

“Matt nearly died when I was seven. Yellowjackets. My family’s allergies are _not_ fucking around, there’s a reason we don’t go camping much.”

Keith makes a vague sympathetic noise. Pidge finds what she needs, spritzes it down the back of her throat, washes it down with a sip from their rationed water pouches. Coran’s space antihistamines are powerful, at least, and work fast, and she leans against the vine-covered metal wall for a bit as she starts breathing clear.

“…okay, that’s better.” She wrinkles her nose. “This place smells gross. Now that I can actually smell.”

“Gross how?”

“Dead things gross, I think.”

She checks Keith’s vitals. Gives him a dose of antihistamines to be safe. Keith coaxes Yorak to give him his scraped-up back leg, and cleans and wraps it up with great gentleness, leaving Yorak to whine and nibble at the bandage.

“Let it sit, you big baby,” Keith murmurs, ruffling his ears. “You know you’ll make it worse otherwise.” He rolls his shoulders, rises, nods at Pidge. The horrible purplish-red tinge has faded from his face. “Ready to move?”

“Ready to move.”

They look to the hole in the wall, then at each other.

“We’re nowhere near the source of the dampening field yet, are we,” Keith says, without particularly making it a question.

“No. Maybe this is a ship that went down, maybe this is part of a larger installation. Either way, we might learn something useful.” Pidge pulls up her wrist com to scan, but it’s hard to get any decent map of the place when it’s this overgrown.

Keith doesn’t argue, just picks their supply bag back up and flicks on his wrist flashlight. Which surprises Pidge a little. She’d been ready for a no-unnecessary-exploration argument, and okay, learning something useful is a _bit_ of a thin excuse, mostly she’s curious.

So, she realizes, is Keith.

They squeeze through the hole and take stock.

 

❧

 

It’s some digging and a few levels down before they can see much more than overgrowth in the vague shape of walls. It’s far thicker inside than it was outside where Pidge opened the dinosaur bar and grill, with no elements to wear it down, and there’s a smell of old compost and rot that gets pretty strong after a while. They go deeper and the vines are withered from lack of sun.

They go deeper and there’s a swatch of decking littered with ancient crusted dead things, and when Keith cuts through that, they drop down into an utterly dark cave of bare metal. There’s a dusty, thoroughly unpleasant smell that Pidge can’t put her finger on, and as they sweep their lights around, they see a dark metal corridor with struts at intervals.

Familiar struts.

“It’s a Galra ship,” Keith says, unnecessarily. “Standard cruiser class.”

“Didn’t Coran say this was pretty much the first galaxy they took over once Zarkon rose to power?” Pidge frowns. “I’m kinda surprised they didn’t shut down this dampening field and colonize this place properly.”

“Maybe the bushwhacking wasn’t worth it. Or maybe they did and abandoned it.” Keith frowns, raking his light over the corridor, then starts padding in one direction. Pidge follows. “This probably went down a while ago.”

“Is it an older design?”

Keith shakes his head. “Galra military equipment has all been standardized since Zarkon took power and converted everything to run on quintessence.”

“Seriously? No updates in ten thousand _years_?”

“All R&D in the empire goes through Haggar. That’s how it was. They didn’t even teach science beyond what was necessary for navigation and maintaining equipment.”

Pidge has to stop for a moment to literally grind her head against the wall. “ _Fascists_ ,” she breathes finally. “That is. A scale of abominably stupid that I can hardly comprehend.” She swallows. “I guess that’s why…why they had to use people like Dad.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Right. Galra empire is incredibly powerful and stupid and cruel, newsflash, moving on.”

“Would you rather they were powerful and smart and cruel?”

“Not really. This sort of thing just…” She wrestles her thoughts back into order and sets off down the corridor. “You know, I probably exist because of it. Mom’s grandfather lost his professor’s chair at the Freiburg university because they were purging the Jewish intellectuals. I never met him, she told me about this when I was little. Said that he’d kept telling himself that it wouldn’t be that bad, but that was his wake-up call, because the rejection of science is a symptom of a sick society. If he hadn’t gotten himself and his wife out…” She chews her lip. “All the rest of his extended family died. Some of them Mom couldn’t track down even with all the modern records.”

It’s Keith’s turn to say _oh_ in a low, quiet sort of way as they pace down the dead ship’s corridor.

“I didn’t know you were Jewish,” he says finally, sounding just a little awkward.

“Eh, only a little. We were barely observant even when Matt and I were kids, like we mostly did Hannukah because presents rock. But Mom’s technically Jewish so I’m technically Jewish, that’s how it works. And hey, we’re nerds with a lot of opinions, we got that part down.”

“That’s a thing?” They’ve reached a door; Keith has fished some little Galra-looking bit of equipment out of some chink of his armor and is busy opening it.

“Ohhhh yes that is very much a thing. Two Jews, three opinions, you never heard that one?” She hesitates for a moment. Conversation. She can make conversation. With mister emo-pants missing-two-years awkward turtle. They can be awkward turtles together, maybe? “Are you anything?”

“What do you mean?” Keith pries the door open.

“Religion, whatever?” Pidge peers around the doorframe. It’s an elevator shaft. Jeez, they _really_ haven’t updated their ship designs—she can recognize the markings now from all the ships they’ve infiltrated over the years. She isn’t used to seeing one dead black, canted sideways, and cracked through with the occasional vine, but still, she’d recognize the forward elevator shaft of a Galra cruiser’s hammerhead in her sleep. Six decks down to security control. “Want to hit security control?”

“That’s what I was thinking. Closest station that might give us an idea of what happened. If any records survived.” He pulls out his blade and pulls out a line from the handle, wrapping it around his palm a few times. Pidge summons her bayard. “And…no, not really. Dad wasn’t anything.” He crouches to stab the knife right into the wall of the elevator shaft. Pidge pings her bayard across to the opposite wall. “I was with a family for a while that was really gung-ho about it. Kept dragging me to church.”

“ _Creepy_.” It takes her a moment to parse the _with a family_ part. Foster, she supposes. Right. It…makes sense. Just sucks.

“Yeah.” He hops lightly over the edge, hanging his weight from one hand and his opposite boot. He makes rappelling look utterly effortless. Pidge just drops herself onto her bayard handle and lets it spools out as Keith walks backwards down the elevator shaft without even bothering to sling the line under his hip. “I mean, it sounded nice at first, thinking there was a guy who’d love me no matter what. Whoever I was.” He’s talking slowly, almost contemplative, almost as if he’s talking to himself, even as he skirts doorframes deck by deck. “But that family, the people at the church, they kept talking about unconditional love, but it was all a sham. There were too many conditions to _breathe_. They yelled at me for three days for giving myself the wrong haircut once, said it made me look gay, so what good is pretending that this is all about a guy who loves everyone?” He’s quiet for a moment, navigating another doorframe. “They didn’t say it, but I think they gave me up because they couldn’t bring me to Jesus or whatever.”

“Dicks.” Pidge spins slowly, biting her lip. “How old were you?”

“Ten, eleven? They gave me up just before my twelfth birthday, I remember that.”

“Is that even legal? Just—putzing out without a real reason like that?”

“Sure. Fostering isn’t like adoption, nobody cares. ‘Child behavior’ is usually the reason.” She can hear the air quotes. Her blood’s running a little cold.

“Sorry if I pried,” she says.

“It’s okay.” He stops at the sixth door down, pulls out his little door-hacker again, gets it open. “It’s…easier to talk about this stuff these days. I’m older, it’s further away. And I have my mom.” He jams a foot in the door to wedge it open. “Sorry if I dumped.”

“It’s okay,” Pidge says, echoing him, and kicks off the elevator wall to swing across and monkey in through the door. “I’m the one who—”

She trips over something and goes down flat on her face.

Behind her, Keith makes a sort of hissing grunt, and there’s a scraping noise, and she turns around to see something long and dark sliding out the open door and down the elevator shaft. The horrible musty smell is worse. She coughs, skin prickling. “What _was—_ ”

“Body,” Keith says, matter of fact. “I think it was leaning against the door when we opened it.” He pulls himself in, then holds his arm out over the shaft and tugs the line.

His blade falls back to his hand.

A few more seconds later than Pidge would like to do the math on, there’s a distant crunch as the body hits the bottom of the elevator shaft.

Pidge does her best to ignore her prickling nerves, and rakes her flashlight over the hallway, and stops. “Mr. Body has friends.”

There’s a few of them, crumpled. The armor’s a different design than she’s ever seen, but has that distinctly Galra sort of styling, and they’re tall and lean and variable, again very Galra. Most of them have their helmets on, so there’s not much actual flesh to look at, but the ways they’ve sagged in their armor are…disconcerting.

No, Pidge realizes after a moment. Not much actual flesh at all. Most of the face of the one closest to her is chewed off, blackened and mummified bits clinging. Some of them have been cracked open like lobsters at the joints, bits scattered just close enough that in the dim light, her brain had pieced them together as a body.

Okay, she _maybe_ needs to look away for a second. And bite her lip.

She doesn’t hear Keith come up behind her; there’s just an extra flashlight now, and she tries not to jump. Then Yorak blinks in beside him, and she tries not to jump _again_.

“Do you recognize their armor?” she asks, because gathering information is better than feeling queasy.

“No. Could be older.” Keith tucks his blade away, then kneels beside one and gingerly turns its wrist over. “They don’t have modern ID tags.”

Pidge frowns. “Why did you say this ship must have gone down a while ago, anyway?”

“The overgrowth.” Keith rocks back to a crouch. She can’t see his face around the green curve of her helmet. “All the vines I’ve been cutting are really slow-growing, especially for vines. I think, anyway. And there was a lot of lichen crust on the upper levels too. If rings are annual here, there was a patch on the outer hull that was at least a thousand years old.”

Pidge blinks a few times, impressed in spite of herself. She might have to stop thinking of Keith as the dumbest team member—which, okay, she never meant anything mean by it, but it had seemed pretty obvious, even with Lance around. “How do you know all that nature stuff?”

“Books, mostly.” He shrugs. “Getting outside whenever I could. Dad taught me some, I think, but he died when I was really little, so…books. Then I lived in the desert for a year, in the floating forest for two.” He stands and flicks his light over the hallway, like he’s counting. “It’s just practical stuff, it’s not like I understand biology.”

“Me neither,” Pidge admits, frank. Keith looks back at her in mild surprise at that. “I’m a _programmer_. I used to hate anything…analog, even. Meeting the Olkari changed that, I’ve learned amazing things from them, but I’m just getting started.”

“Mn,” Keith says, and most of the time Pidge would feel dismissed by something like that, but it feels okay now, somehow. It sounds like an acknowledgement instead. “This is a large crew. I think these were all infantry.”

“Not sentries?”

Keith shakes his head. “Kolivan mentioned once…apparently in the early days of the empire, sentries weren’t actually used for anything except, well, being sentries. Boring guard posts, carrying stuff. But then the empire started getting literally too big for the Galra population to police, and Zarkon put through a batch of really rigid regulations about discipline and resource management which actually lessened the standing military. Incineration on the spot for ever speaking against the Emperor, that sort of thing.” He snorts. “Apparently some guys joined the Blade just because they found the overuse of sentries offensive and wanted to get a chance to fight with real people and not just herd robots all day long.”

“Okay, well, they can do them, but I hate to say I’m with the Empire on that point. Not the incineration, but if _I_ had a robot army…” She stops and frowns. “So the technology hasn’t changed, but other stuff has?”

“Yeah. A lot, from what I’ve heard. The whole structure of the military, regulations, deployment, management, everything.”

“That had to have pissed some people off.”

“Sure, but I think they all disappeared millennia ago.”

That sounds, Pidge thinks, like a guys-in-a-back-van-at-three-AM sort of disappeared, and she shudders. “Security station?”

Keith nods, wordless, and paces down the hall. Until they find an entirely different body: an unarmored skeleton, quadrupedal.

“Local wildlife?” she asks

“Probably whatever ate all their faces.” He studies it for a moment. “Something else ate it.”

Pidge pulls up her wrist scanner again. “I’m not getting any movement or heat signatures anywhere.”

Keith nods. “I don’t think anything living has come here in…millennia, maybe.”

“I need a fedora and a whip,” Pidge says, and finds the turn to the security center.

“Why…” Keith starts, then shakes his head and follows.

 

❧

 

The security center is a mausoleum.

The smell is the worst in here: it’s definitely the bodies. Especially the last, lonely, mummified coyote-hedgehog in the corner, who’d starved to death when it ran out of corpses to eat. It’s a not a _new_ smell, certainly, but it’s still hair-raising. Pidge mostly breathes through her mouth as they pick their way to the main console.

“This,” she mutters, “is usually when I’d stick Shiro’s hand on it. We’ll need a power source if we want to get anything off this.”

Keith rummages in his equipment and pulls out a softly glowing purple disc and hands it to her. “It’s not much, but it should get you in.”

“I need one of these,” she says, flipping it between her fingers a few times to study it before she smacks it onto the console. “Also that door-cracker you were using before.”

“Ask Kolivan. It’s all Blade equipment.”

“Galra spy toys. _Cool_.” She powers the console up. It sputters, coughs up static on half-broken holo-emitters. “Okay. Mission logs.”

The video’s shot. Scraps of audio, all the intact data that she could scrub out, start to surface. It’s too garbled to even tell how many voices there are.

_—deserters will be impaled—_

_—don’t care if the air is poison, lieutenant, wear a damn helmet and get that dampening fiel—_

_—e conquered Altea itself, we can conquer these tree-hugging rabble, they’re nothing—_

_—first wave, my ass, I can see five other dead cruisers from my porthole, this was a goddamn suicide mission—_

_—atmospheric scrubbers failed, sir, sixty-two men choked out before they got to their helmets—_

_—no reinforcements—_

“That header,” Keith says quietly, pointing to one chunk of data. “Mission briefing, orders and failure conditions. It’s always at the top of a ship’s logs.”

“Let me see if I can clean it up.” Pidge pulls it into her wrist computer, runs the best data reconstruction she can. This time, the garbled voice and a patchwork video come off the little holo-emitter on her wrist.

It’s Zarkon.

He looks…younger, she thinks. Though there’s still that eerie glow in his eyes, flattered to white by the washed-out video, all the color channels stripped by data degradation.

_Your mission is to destroy—_

He bursts into haze, and Pidge grumbles, makes a few more adjustments.

_—will secure a complete victory for the Galra. You will execute all life forms, destroy all planetary infrastructure, and wipe these traitors from the face of this galaxy. You are the first wave of invasion, and any rumors about a previous wave are false information and treason. Any fear that these weak and duplicitous aliens have the power to harm us is treason. Remember our triumphs at Altea and Nalquod and Rygnirath, and do not forget that these inferiors are equally complicit in the senseless destruction of our motherworld. Your orders are to raze the Dalterion Belt to its component atoms in the name of Galra and fallen Daibazaal. Failure will be punishable by death. Vrepit sa._

The hologram flickers out.

Pidge doesn’t realize she has her hand over her mouth until she bites her knuckle.

“Trigel,” she blurts. “The first Green Paladin. This—this was her home.”

 

❧

 

“Pidge,” says Keith, after a few more rounds of trying to scrub more data out of a ten-thousand year old computer. “I think we should probably camp here for the night. It’s a little early, but we’re still not going to make it that much further before we’d have to find a place, and it’s safer here. We can sleep through the night, no standing watches, and be fresh in the morning.”

“Okay,” Pidge says slowly, finally peeling off the power disk in resignation and handing it back to Keith. “But the upper decks. I’m not sleeping in a pile of corpses, and I’ll spend the whole night thinking I just made the stupidest possible decision in the first ten minutes of _Revenge of the Alien Zombies._ ”

“Is that actually a thing?”

“Probably. I dunno.” They start retracing their steps back to the elevator shaft. “There was some alien zombie stripper movie, I think? Matt’s bad zombie movie phase was a trial for the whole family.”

“Sounds like it,” Keith says, wrinkling his nose.

By the time they’ve found a sector a few decks up with a tolerable ratio of bunks to corpses, Pidge had told Keith about the entire trajectory of Matt’s bad zombie movie phase and he’s somehow still talking to her, which seems so significant that Pidge can’t even quite deal with it.

 

❧

 

“Hey, Keith,” Pidge asks quietly, an hour and a half later.

It’s ink-dark with their suit flashlights out; the only light is Yorak bioluminescing softly in his sleep, a faint pulse in time with his breathing where he’s curled up with Keith. Yorak’s glow catches the white of their armor, peeled off and piled in the corner for comfort—except for Keith’s borrowed helmet, of course, he has to sleep in that, and it’s damn convenient that they have nigh-infinite power sources and air recycling and an atmosphere-filtering forcefield mode so he can put memetically chicken-like charred dino in his face. But there’s not much else to see except that eerie pile of armor, and it’s dead silent in the graveyard ship, and Pidge’s brain is whirring.

“Mm?”

“Can you sleep?”

“Not yet,” he answers after a moment, and she sees the faint white of his helmet bob and rise across the room as he sits up. Yorak whuffs, and his glow flickers a little brighter, and Keith makes a vague soothing noise at him. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Just thinking.”

“About what?”

Pidge hesitates, trying to figure out where to even start, how much Keith would even care about.

“I don’t mind you talking,” Keith says carefully after a moment. “Like I said. I know I’m not very good at the whole team thing, but. I don’t mind.”

“…thanks.”

“Is it the whole trying to sleep on a ghost ship thing?”

“Some.” It’s easier to admit into the darkness, when Keith’s nothing but a splotch of helmet. “It’s how weird this whole planet is. It just…it doesn’t feel right. Like a place people could live.”

“The whole ecosystem’s out of balance,” Keith says quietly. Then makes a frustrated noise. “You _know_ I’m not a scientist. But I lived on the back of a space whale for two years, and the way all the animals and what ate what worked there made a lot more sense than this.”

“Maybe they didn’t live here,” Pidge theorizes into the gloom. “Trigel’s people, I mean. Maybe this was some sort of…biowarfare site. It stopped an entire invasion fleet.”

“Do you know anything about the Dalterion Belt?”

“No. Not except that Trigel was from there. I kept meaning to ask Coran, but there was always more pressing stuff, and we’ve lost even more of the Castle’s archives now.” She bites her lip against a wave of bitter grief. “I’d always wondered what the belt part meant. A dense planetary region? Could it be that asteroid belt?”

“If a space whale can be liveable, I don’t see why an asteroid belt couldn’t.”

“Nn. Fair.” She pauses. “You’ve got to tell me more about that someday, by the way. Now that we’re…now that we’ve actually maybe figured out how to have a conversation.”

Keith laughs, softly, once. “How many years did it take us?”

“A while. It’s not like I’m any better at the team thing.”

“You…are, though,” Keith says slowly, sounding faintly puzzled. “You’re friendly, you’re approachable, you don’t alienate people.”

Pidge blinks, lost. “Don’t mix me up with Hunk.”

“I’m not.” Now he sounds faintly exasperated. “You made friends on the team a lot faster than I did. Hunk, Lance.”

“Honestly, I’m not sure how much Lance and I are actually friends, he just sort of attaches himself to Hunk. I’ll give you Hunk, we talk the same language, but you’re probably a lot closer to Lance than I am.”

“Me?” Keith makes a vague disgruntled noise. “He’s made it clear how much he doesn’t like me.”

“You’ve got the whole right-hand-man thing going. He’s…he’s there for you.”

Keith is quiet for a long moment. “I…guess he is.” Another, shorter silence. “Is it weird that we’re arguing over which of us is closer to Lance.”

Pidge snorts. “Yeah, we’re all like, no you are, you take him. Also if we’re gonna argue about dumb stuff, I’m pretty sure you’re better at the whole team thing than I am.”

“…you’re joking.”

“No.” She picks at the seams of her undersuit, rearranging them down her legs—it starts to itch when she wears it this long. “You got pretty good at watching out for us by the time Shiro came…the clone came back.”

“And then I fucked it all up when I was splitting my time.”

Pidge stalls out on that, because okay, yes, that was a dick move. A series of dick moves. It’s not like she didn’t hate parade duty with the power of a thousand fiery suns—everybody did except for Lance, really, it wasn’t fair that Keith got to punt it to go be a ninja and she didn’t. If she’d had something like the Blade? Yeah, she’d have been out of there. And then let the team down, just like he did. It’s not the _point_ though, she thinks, and says, “You’re better about other people’s feelings than I am.”

“Me,” Keith says in flat disbelief. “This is the weirdest argument.”

“It’s not actually an argument. I’m not upset at you.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

Pidge hesitates for a while, then asks, “If it gets like that again, with all the stupid parades, or if Shiro starts piloting Black full-time or whatever, what are you going to do?”

“My place is with Voltron,” Keith says, quiet and firm. “I’ll liaise with the Blade. We need better communication lines, the Kral Zera proved that. But as long as I’m needed to form Voltron, I won’t do a mission that I can’t be extracted from on immediate notice.”

“Unless you’re crashed on an alien planet.”

“Well. We couldn’t have known.” He pauses. “Worst comes to worst, somebody could wormhole in outside of the dampening field and do an orbital drop right onto your coordinates. Krolia’s used to working through gravity fluctuations.” Another pause. “Point is, my priority is Voltron. I’m not going to lose sight of that again. I guess it’s pretty dumb, looking back on it, me yelling at you when you tried to leave on Arus.”

“Yup,” Pidge says frankly. “But if you won’t say I told you so, I won’t. Okay, it’s past our bedtime and we’re talking with the lights out, it’s AMA hour, that’s the rule.”

“AMA?” Keith echoes blankly.

“Ask me anything.”

“Oh.”

“How’d you figure out I was a girl back then?”

Keith’s quiet for a long moment.

“That’s too much quiet,” Pidge needles.

“It’s a really small shack,” he says, sounding slightly terrified.

“You _didn’t_.”

“I just saw your back and your sports bra. Honestly at the time I figured you were trans, but then you said you were a girl, so…”

Pidge laughs. “Well, I guess that wasn’t actually as compromising as Hunk stealing my diary.”

“Please tell me you kicked his ass for that.”

“Just a little.”

“I really wasn’t trying to be creepy,” Keith says earnestly. “I’m not. Like that.”

“I’m not mad, seriously. I have _way_ bigger things to worry about than who sees my ratty bra.”

That actually gets a short laugh out of Keith. “Fair enough.”

“AMA.”

“Huh?”

“We trade off.”

“Oh.” Keith’s quiet for a while; there’s a rustling like he’s rearranging, and a bit of a flicker as Yorak shifts. Pidge’s eyes are starting to adjust. She can almost pick out Keith’s form beyond the blotch of helmet. “Do you…ever miss being a boy?”

Pidge blinks. “Oh my god. Keith. Are you trying to get me to do the gender talk?”

“Should I not…”

“No, no, I called AMA, I’m not backing out, it’s just that gender is stupid.”

“That’s kind of an answer.”

“It’s just…okay. I don’t mind being a girl, like, physically. Except for the periods, but then I figured out there’s a space pill for that, so that’s squared away, also I’m going to steal the formula and sell it on Earth and make a million bucks. Anyway, what I don’t like is when people come at me with weird assumptions because I’m a girl. Like excuse me, princess, you don’t know what I like or what I’m into or how I feel about stuff or _anything_ about me just because I pee sitting down. That stuff’s _obnoxious_.” She pauses. “I don’t mean excuse me princess at Allura even if she got kind of weird at me once, that’s just a phrase. But when I was being a boy…that wasn’t any better. It was just a different set of weird assumptions that was gross in different ways. I guess I kept up the disguise longer than I should have because I didn’t want people to start treating me like the team chick, because that would have _sucked_ , the team chick is always the lamest character.”

Keith makes a _hn_ sort of noise, which is the most response he’s given her through the whole thing, so she grinds to a halt and makes a _hn_ noise in return. “Why do you and Lance do that?” he asks after a moment. “Talk about us like we’re…all playing roles.”

“Isn’t that what people do? Figure out their thing and do it and then hope other people think their thing is what they think their thing is? Also we’re kind of literally space power rangers, it’s hard to not think that way sometimes.”

“Oh. I never watched power rangers.” Keith’s settled fully, she can make out by now, knees to his chest and chin on his knees, and Pidge thinks vaguely about how catlike some Galra are and the fact that he pretty much looks like a chill cat right now and then wonders about the vast Galra phenotypical diversity, which admittedly is something she wonders about at least once a week, and then worries if she’s been talking too much and Keith is bored, which is about when he says, “Aren’t some people neither guys nor girls, isn’t that a thing?”

“I guess? But people would have weird assumptions about that too. And I guess some people would be more likely to try to talk with me about it because I’m being all mysteriously nonbinary and they want an explanation but honestly the people who’d try to do that are probably assholes anyway and I don’t want to have the conversation three times a day and honestly I do not give a single flying fuck about the whole thing. I just want people to know me.” She stops for a moment because her throat’s tight. She isn’t sure why her throat’s tight. Not allergy tight, she thinks. The antihistamines are still working. That might have gotten a little raw. “Actually know me. Not think they know me because of how they think whatever gender they think I am works. Wow, I’m tired, I just used think three times in a sentence.” She swallows again, trying to make the tightness go away. “Honestly, I really like being in space. Nobody I talk to off the team knows what human gender is, they just take me as I am. Even if they’re sexually dimorphic, the roles and assumptions are different, you know? And even if they’re projecting something onto me, it doesn’t—it’s something alien, it’s not relevant to me, it doesn’t _hurt_ the way it does when somebody thinks I’m not good enough at being a girl to be a real person.”

Keith huffs. “People suck.”

“Yeah. I’d say back at you, about ye olde gender talk, but…”

“Mm. I’m a guy.”

“Kind of figured.”

“I’m gay,” Keith offers quietly into the silence. “I never thought much about the gender stuff until I snuck into the GSA once. Heard people talking about it.”

“Why do you say snuck into? Aren’t they open, like isn’t that the point?”

“Well, nobody talked to me, so it felt like sneaking.”

“You too, huh.” Pidge tucks her knees to her chest. “What…was it with you? You weren’t a nerd.”

He snorts. “No. I just…it was a couple of things, I guess. I switched schools a lot, and I never fit in anywhere. If people tried to bully me, I’d kick their asses, so people got scared of me. They actually put Most Likely To Start School Shooting in my middle school yearbook.”

“Oh man. I’m not even sure whether that’s an insult or a compliment.”

“It got to me at the time. I didn’t want to kill anybody. Just keep to myself.” Silence stretches. She can see the silhouette of his hand moving over Yorak’s stripes as he pets him. “I never tried. To make friends, I mean. I always figured…that family would send me back and I’d move schools, or those friends would give up on me once they realized I wasn’t worth it. If people tried to talk to me I’d ignore them. Didn’t think it was worth it. And then people would think I was stuck up or something.”

“Oh my _god_ I know! If I’m reading something, I’m reading something, not wanting to talk to somebody sticking their nose in my business doesn’t make me the antisocial spawn of Satan.” Pidge groans and scrubs her hands through her hair. “I used to get written up for behavioral problems all the time. Like it’s my fault that other people didn’t like me.”

“Me too. Well, also for fighting.”

“And okay, maybe sometimes it was my fault, I’m crap about some stuff and I talk too much sometimes, but there are levels. I had this one teacher in the fourth grade who was like full-on rainbow fish bullshit…”

“Rainbow fish? What?”

“Did they not cram that book down your throat? I hate that book. Seriously. Stop me now or I’m going to rant for twenty minutes straight about why I hate that book, I am not even kidding.”

Keith just shrugs.

“You’re not stopping me. Wow. Okay. _So_ …”

 

❧

 

They sleep eventually.

Pidge wakes to a soft beeping from Keith’s wrist com in the corner, and it takes her a long moment to orient herself, and remember why she’s sleeping on something hard and purple in her undersuit, and why everything is still pitch-dark, and why her mouth tastes like death and her eyes have enough sand in them to fill a beach.

Breakfast is a field ration and a dose of antihistamines.

Yet somehow, for being temporarily marooned on an alien biohazard, Pidge feels strangely chipper when they surface into the early morning sunlight. The red sun’s come up first, so dawn is low and pink and purple, and clouds of mist are starting to sublimate off the jungle floor, and it actually looks kind of pretty compared to empty dark metal halls full of ancient corpses.

Maybe it’s because the jungle looks kind of pretty.

Maybe it’s because she’s here with a friend.

Keith pushes a hard pace through most of the morning, but even he seems less on edge. He teams up with her for a scanner sweep, finds a ridge facing in more or less the right direction, and takes them up and along the northern crest of it. “Less undergrowth above the basins, I’ve noticed. More thorns, but whatever, we’re wearing armor. We’ll make good time.”

They do, in fact, make good time. Keith seems to be settling in to the place; he moves easier, slipping through the jungle like he belongs there. Pidge occasionally just gives up and pops her jump-jets to catch up, even after the time she runs afoul of a branch. Yorak trots circles, scouting, occasionally blinking back to Keith’s side.

In spurts, punctuated by companionable silence, Pidge decants a startlingly large amount of information about what kind of ecology might form on the back of a space whale, which is just _cool_ , and at some point she’ll have to figure out how to visit the place without losing years or falling into a spatial distortion or having her ship eaten by ghost space eyeballs.

As the sun grows high, winking through the trees, Keith’s whole mannerism seems to shift, and he slows down—to Pidge’s relief—scanning through the endless swathes of jungle like he’s looking for something.

“You look like you’re looking for something,” Pidge says bluntly.

“Yeah,” Keith says. “Lunch.”

“Is _anything_ here easy to kill?” Pidge sighs.

“No. But we’re down to our last ration bars and I want to keep those in reserve in case something goes wrong. Besides, Yorak needs to eat too, and there’s no small prey he can run down on his own.”

“I’m surprised nothing’s tried to make _us_ lunch yet.”

Keith shrugs. “Predators don’t have high population density. Especially when there’s not much to eat. I’ve seen enough tracks that I think there are a few more things running around besides the one we killed and those scavenger packs. I’ve been keeping an eye out for fresh marks.”

“Well, let’s try to find something easier to electrocute.”

Keith nods. They’re close enough in step that she can see a flash of a smile beyond the curve of his helmet. “Going to be easier to snare something than fight it anyway.”

“Great minds,” Pidge says, unspooling her bayard with a grin.

 

❧

 

It maybe doesn’t go _exactly_ as planned, but they have lunch around a small campfire: one leg of an absolutely vicious reddish leopard-thing. Keith _maybe_ has to help disinfect and bandage up Pidge’s thigh, and it maybe takes forever to distill water to top off their supplies, but the local scavengers are mostly distracted by the rest of their kill, and also don’t seem to like being electrocuted.

The last leg of the trip, in the increasingly hot afternoon, is a long, mostly silent slog, punctuated by heartening pings from Pidge’s scans as they get closer to the nexus in the dampening field that she thinks is a control node. Thinks. Desperately hopes. With Keith at her side, she probably _could_ live here for a while, but that doesn’t exactly mean she _wants_ to. Even if it’s been an enlightening journey of deepening her connection to nature and also to the teammate she’d thought she had nothing in common with, and even if she has top-tier space antihistamines, there are only so many times a girl wants to pee in the woods.

Finally, with her wrist computer going nuts, they push into a strangely tidy circular clearing, and Pidge’s jaw drops.

The structure at the center—she’s gonna have to go with structure because she’s got no clue—is easily sixty feet tall and just as wide, and she feels that tingle down her spine she gets when she lays eyes on something so unbelievably beautiful and advanced that it soaks up her entire attention in an instant.

It takes her a moment to parse the complex bundle of spires and sides. One of the stellations of the icosahedron? No, the core faces under the stellation are something more complicated than that. It’s made of some solid, uniform pale brown material, unreflective and almost plasticky-looking, but as they come closer, she starts to see that the texture is subtly complex, coils and patterns. Leaves, she thinks at first.

Then, closer, she realizes they’re helixes. DNA models. Coil upon coil. And that what she’d thought was a solid surface is only the first layer. She might be narrating all this out loud to Keith, she isn’t even sure.

She scans, a little belatedly. The materials analysis judders off the substance it’s composed of—the closest thing it can cough up is some of the organic metals the Olkari use in their most complicated work. But whatever it is, it seems to extend below the surface. She can’t tell how far. Maybe if she calibrates her scanners to look for the emission lines, the same way Hunk tracked the Blue Lion…

“Pidge?”

She jolts at Keith’s voice. She’s actually been stunned into silence. For who knows how long.

“It goes all the way down to the planet’s core,” she breathes. “I think—it _is_ the planet’s core. It’s…it’s some sort of planet-sized living computer. Hoooly quiznak. The Olkari have never built anything like this. Even that Altean terraforming plant on Nacxela looks like child’s play next to this…”

“You’re hyperventilating.”

“Who _wouldn’t?_ ” she blurts. “I mean, do you have any idea how _insanely_ awesome this is?” She manages to breathe for a moment. “The gravitational fields—this must be why they’re so wonky. It’s manipulating gravity all through its sector of the solar system. If Trigel’s people built this… _think_ about it, Keith, they were so much more advanced than the Galra or the Alteans, even ten thousand years ago. If any of them survived, if we could learn even a fraction of what’s here…”

“Okay,” Keith says slowly. “But we’re going to need to get your lion back online before we do any of that.”

“Right. Yes. Lion.” She swallows hard. “Okay. What would be an access port. I _really_ hope I don’t need to be telekinetic, or have something like an Olkari control circlet, or…”

One of the stellated faces flares green, and light sweeps over them both.

“Or that,” Keith says, studying it warily.

A faint puff of smoke drifts off one of the tallest spires, and Pidge catches a faint whiff of something musky. And then clamps her hand over her mouth, fear rising. A poison? They only have one working helmet—Keith had tucked his into the bag, but she needed the equipment on Green to fix it, kilometers away—

But her lungs and throat don’t seize. She waves away the fear, starts intensively scanning the green-glowing face of the structure. It flickers, scans back.

Then letters float in green light a few inches above the surface. Not English, but she’s gotten decent with the written language by now, and her gauntlet’s helpfully scrolling English subtitles regardless.

 _Language interface selection: Altean_.

“Sure. Okay. I can work with Altean.”

_Who are you?_

“My name is Pidge. I’m the current Green Paladin. Your energy dampening field took down my lion, and I need to free her.”

“Uh, Pidge,” Keith says, low and careful.

Blank green light for a moment. Then, _Who do you serve?_

Pidge blinks. “The Voltron Coalition? Anyone who needs us? We’re pretty independent.”

“ _Pidge_. We’ve got company.”

She glances over her shoulder.

A hedgehog-coyote thing prowls out of the woods. Two. Five. A dozen.

“Oh quiznak,” she croaks.

“I think that scent attracted them,” Keith says. “A defense of some some sort.” Yorak’s close to his side, hackles up, practically a hedgehog himself. “I’m gonna try to keep them off you.”

Pidge feels a hot stab of fear. And guilt. If Keith gets hurt guarding her ass like this—

She summons her bayard. Squeezes it for a moment and whispers, “He needs all the help he can get,” and presses it into his hand.

“Pidge,” Keith starts, blinking.

It doesn’t revert. The green V of light hovers in front of his fist.

“They don’t like being zapped,” she says, and goes back to arguing with a wall. Because—well, so far she’s pretty sure it’s going to be arguing with a wall. Her gauntlet can’t even find a _way_ to interface directly, never mind crack in and shut down the dampening field. Not yet, anyway. She’s never met anything she can’t crack, it’s _frustrating._ “Okay, what’s it going to take for you to stop trying to kill us and let us fly out of here?”

She is not, after all, the most diplomatic member of this party.

_How did you receive the Green Lion?_

She hears a snarl and a scuffle of claws in dirt behind her. A crackle of electricity. Keith fights like a wraith, she tells herself—not hearing him is a good thing. “Allura sent me to her. Princess Allura of Altea, maybe you heard of her? Her father put her into stasis so she could survive Zarkon’s attack and reunite Voltron against him.”

_So you are not Zarkon’s associate?_

“ _God_ no. The Galra Empire kidnapped and tortured my _family_. I would never help Zarkon or anyone like him.” Crunch. A high-pitched yowl.

_So you have never worked with the Galra Empire?_

“No!”

_Incomplete response._

Pidge tries very, very hard not to punch the incredibly advanced, nerdgasm-inducing, _obnoxious_ ancient computer. So it’s a lie detector too. Great. “If you can scan my thoughts, why not just take that data and make your choice? We’re kind of edible here!”

_It is instinct and conscious will both that shape a person’s identity and actions. I wish to understand both. You simplified complexity in your response._

“We had an alliance with Zarkon’s son Lotor,” Pidge says in a rush through gritted teeth. “He killed his father, took over the Empire, fed us a very large pack of lies. We seriously thought he was trying to make the universe a better place. And when we realized otherwise, we kicked his ass and left him dead in a dimensional rift. We fucked up, we fixed it. Satisfied?”

_He will not remain dead in that rift for long._

“ _Thanks_ ,” Pidge mutters darkly. In unison with Keith.

A coyote hedgehog slams into the wall next to her, reels, whirls on her with bared and dripping fangs. Yorak dives after it, going for its throat.

“Call them off!” Pidge snaps. “ _Please!_ We’re not here to hurt anybody, we’re just looking for a flower to make a food replicator, for god’s sake.”

The wall sits blank for a moment.

“Please,” Pidge whispers again, chancing a look over her shoulder. Keith’s favoring his left, heavily. There’s blood on the ground, and not the yellowish stuff the scavengers bleed.

Another puff of smoke drifts off the top of the structure.

The scavengers hiss, drift back a few feet, bristling.

 _Your comrade is Galra_ , the wall puts forth.

“Not all Galra,” Pidge groans. “Look. He was raised on my home planet, Earth. He’s half human. He never even _knew_ about the Empire until they kidnapped and tortured his best friend, because that’s just what they fucking _do_. He’s been fighting them ever since, just like me. He’s a Paladin too—Red at first, now kind of acting Black Paladin, it’s gotten complicated.” The wall is still frustratingly blank. “He’s a good guy. Kind of rude sometimes, but a really, honestly good guy.” More blank. “Do you really think he could use my bayard if I didn’t trust him?”

More blank.

Keith limps up beside her and presses her bayard back into her hand. She lets him sling an arm around her shoulder, dig in his heels. “You okay?” she blurts. “You’re bleeding.”

“It’s not bad. I don’t think.” His voice is a little ragged. “I’m Keith. She…explained it.”

_Incomplete response._

Keith drags a long slow breath and closes his eyes for a moment. “I…have trouble thinking of myself as a good person. The rest is pretty true. Including the rude part.”

_Why?_

Keith sways against her for a moment. “Seriously,” Pidge says, “do we need to put getting judged by a mind-blowingly cool supercomputer on hold while we do something about that hole in you?”

“Because when everybody treats you as disposable trash for years, it’s hard not to believe it,” Keith says, voice low. “I’ve made my mistakes and done what I can to fix them, same as anyone. My self-image maybe isn’t the best, you might be picking up on that.”

 _Understandable_ , the computer answers, after a long moment of stillness. _I do not sense your Lion, neither the Red nor the Black._

“I haven’t flown Red in a while,” Keith says. “Black’s back with the rest of the team. I think Shiro, his original paladin, will still be able to fly him if there’s an emergency, and that base needs all the defense it can get. We’re kind of sitting ducks right now with our mothership gone.”

More stillness. Circling growls from behind them as an acrid, vaguely grapefruity scent continues to hang in the air.

_Do you both swear to protect life?_

That’s a hell of a question, Pidge thinks, and says, “Yes.” So does Keith.

_Incomplete response._

“Oh, come _on_ ,” says Pidge. “It’s complicated and you know it. I mean, you’re clearly an incredibly advanced AI.”

“I will kill to protect those who need it,” Keith says, voice low and steady. “I can’t swear not to do that. But I saw the dead Galra cruisers out there. So will you.”

Pidge clenches her jaw, and tries to at least find Keith’s wound and get some pressure on it. He’s got one of his gloves clamped to his side; she presses her hand over his. “I can’t swear to preserve life as a sole, overriding directive. That leads—well, that leads to destroying people’s free will, making them slaves who can’t even _think_ , because preserving their physical life is the most important thing. I’ve _seen_ it.”

“Change and conflict and death are part of life,” Keith says. “Too much and you become needlessly cruel. But if you try to deny that, you get…yeah, like what Pidge said. It’s.” He has to pause to breathe for a moment. “A balance.”

“Balanced equilibrium,” Pidge says.

“Like an ecosystem.”

Teeth gnash somewhere behind them.

“Well, not this one,” Pidge mutters.

_Well reasoned._

The acrid smell thickens, along with the beleaguered whining of the hedgehog-coyotes.

 _Your lion will wake in a few doboshes_ , the screen informs them. _Please treat your comrade._ Then, after a pause, it adds, _The line between medicine and poison is often thin._ It projects an image of a thorny vine. _A deep scratch from this plant would solidify his blood, but a light prick will promote clotting in the area._

Pidge stares at the screen for a moment. “He’s only half Galra, and his physiology leans pretty human. Plus he’s really small.”

“ _Hey_ ,” Keith says, a little weakly. “I’ll take my chances with bandages. But thanks.”

 

❧

 

Five minutes later, Green gallops down to the clearing, rumbling with concern.

“Hey, girl!” Pidge waves so hard her elbow clicks. “Missed you! Welcome back.”

Green loafs in the clearing, her tail thrashing between some cracked tree trunks, and drops her head low, touching her chin down feather-light only a few feet from them. Pidge bounds to her feet, hugs the corner of her jaw for a moment, then pats it insistently.

“Can you open up? Keith’s hurt, and this air’s poison to him. I want to give him clean air to rest in.”

Green churrs and opens wide.

 _Welcome, Green Lion,_ Pidge reads out of the corner of her eye. _I am glad to see you free and in the hands of a good paladin._

Green rumbles somewhere deep inside her, almost a sigh, as Pidge helps Keith up the ramp. There’s a strange tingle down Pidge’s spine, a coil of _something_ in her hindbrain. Green’s feelings, she thinks, without any hard evidence. Old and grieving and bittersweet. That _is_ what she was feeling when they first came to this system. _Communication_.

“I wish I’d known this was your old paladin’s home,” Pidge said quietly as they pile into the cockpit. “I’m sorry.”

Green doesn’t answer, just pulses the screen still showing the flower they’re looking for, as if to point out that she starting this.

“Yeah, still.” She pauses and takes a deep breath—thank god, clean air. Even with the industrial strength antihistamines, she can feel the difference. “Have you scrubbed the air? There’s some organic compound here that Keith’s deathly allergic to.”

Green flashes up a screen confirming pure, human-spec atmopshere, no unauthorized compounds, and Pidge reaches to unseal Keith’s helmet. He heaves a huge breath in relief and starts to pick off bits of armor. There’s a trickle of blood through his sweat-matted hair, helmet-flattened to his skull, and he’s got that red imprint on his temples they all get when they’re stuck in their helmets for too long.

She gives Keith the pilot’s seat, the comfiest in the house, and helps get the rest of his armor out of the way and peel his undersuit down. It’s a heavy gash to his side. Some other bruises and scrapes—and older scars, she’s noticing, he’s got more than his share—but at least there’s only one notable wound. “It skimmed off my ribs,” Keith says. “Didn’t pierce my chest cavity. I’ll be fine with some bleeding containment.”

“You’d _better_ be,” Pidge says, reaching to do just that. Disinfect. Gingerly pull the sides closed and smack on a few of their precious remaining Altean wound closures, glowing blue, good as sutures, and painless and sterile. Bandaging is a chore that takes up half his chest and most of their remaining supplies. Even after that and a round of painkillers, he’s moving his sword arm gingerly. Pidge’s leg throbs in sympathy. “And,” she says slowly, as she seals off the last bit of bandage. “Thanks. For covering me.”

“You’re my teammate,” Keith says, like it’s nothing, like he’s not getting half-dried blood on her pilot’s chair because she couldn’t properly hack a computer. An incredibly advanced, incredibly alien computer, but still. He lifts his left hand a little diffidently with a soft smile that actually reaches his eyes. “And my friend.”

Pidge’s chest clenches a little and she clasps his hand hard.

“Now get back out there and make friends with the weird planet computer. I’ll be fine.”

“Jeez,” she says, and blinks hard once. “Hey, girl, turn on the monitors and speakers, will you? I want him to be able to chat with us.”

Green lights up with a hum, and Pidge scampers back down the ramp.

 

❧

 

The weird planet computer, after a half hour of _actual_ conversation rather than trying to prove she didn’t need to be eliminated, is in fact pretty friendly. Pidge learns that it’s called the Second Shepherd, that it had sister installations on the other two rocky planets, and that it knows it’s now alone, as it hasn’t received a ping update from them in over three hundred trillion ticks. That its original function was managing gravitational fields in the system and that it was rapidly reprogrammed and equipped as a bio-terraforming station to deploy an ecosystem to destroy any downed Galra ships. That, in fact, three invasion waves, the last totalling nearly a hundred cruisers, had fallen to the three Shepherds before the other two went offline and the ships stopped coming. That the surviving Shepherd didn’t know what happened to the rest of the Dalterion Belt.

The Shepherd has full genetic profiles of every organism deployed on its surface, as well as some ability to manipulate the behavior of some, but none of those hundreds of plants are the one they’re looking for. Pidge does get a sample of the coagulant vine, as well as about a dozen other plants the Shepherd says have valuable medicinal or engineering properties.

The whole time, there seems to be an entirely _different_ conversation going on between the Shepherd and Green. The lion has slid a paw forward to tuck a claw delicately between two flanges, and green light pulses softly back and forth, and neither of them seem inclined to share much. Processing, maybe, Pidge thinks, if they both knew Trigel. Even if there were other survivors from the Dalterion Belt somewhere, Coran had been pretty sure about the rest of the original paladins dying in Zarkon’s campaign.

The Shepherd goes very quiet when she asks if there might be survivors, and finally says, _There may be a seed._

“A seed? What do you mean? Like a…a seed vault?”

_Trigel never lost hope. She spoke to me once of a seed she wished to plant. I do not know more than that._

Pidge settles a hand on her lion’s claw. “Are you lonely?” she asks, after a moment, on impulse.

There’s a long, long pause of green light.

_I sleep._

“Incomplete response,” Pidge mutters.

_You have no data with which to substantiate that statement._

“Yeah, I’m not reading your mind. Still.”

_There is little alternative. I am the last Shepherd. The many intelligences of the Belt have also not responded to ping for a comparable amount of time. Galra ships pass in increasing intervals, but I have no wish to make contact, and no need to kill if they do not attack me._

“Hey, Keith,” Pidge calls over her shoulder. “Do you think it would be possible to rig her up with the same kind of quantum communicator you have?”

“If it had a counterpart on Olkarion or something,” comes Keith’s voice from her lion’s loudspeaker. “They come in pairs. You probably get why better than I do. I _could_ leave mine, but you explain to Kolivan why he’s getting calls from a lonely computer.” He pauses. “Also using it too frequently could give away your location. I’m guessing the Galra don’t know you’re still active, unless they think you’re a space Bermuda Triangle or something. Which probably doesn’t translate.”

_I haunt this system._

“In a sense,” Keith says, almost gently. “I know the core systems, the old galaxies that have been under Galra control for millennia, aren’t patrolled very heavily, and mostly by sentry crews. Still, you probably don’t want to draw attention to yourself.”

 _I do not. I remember how bent on death they were._ There’s one of those blank pauses. _Thank you for your sympathy. But I can sleep._

“You’ll be free to talk to us all the time one day,” Keith says. “We’re not giving up the fight to free the universe just because Zarkon and Lotor are gone.”

“Also there is no _way_ I’m not visiting when I can,” Pidge puts in. “I mean, you’re the most exquisite piece of technology I’ve ever seen!”

 

❧

 

Green insists upon taking off for orbit sooner rather than later. Apparently, the Shepherd informs them, some of the local predators mark their territory. The one-leg-lifted way. Pidge pulls a face. “ _Fair._ Hey, can you make Keith a bunk? I think we could both use a rest before we.” She stops. “We’re exploring the Belt, aren’t we? Or should we come back?”

Keith sighs and squints down at his bandages. “The bleeding’s slowing down. I’ll be okay for another day without a pod. But if the flower’s not here, shouldn’t we get back to Olkarion and leave this for later?”

Green makes a subliminal, unhappy-sounding noise.

Pidge pauses, trying to sort out her whirling brain into actual thoughtful priorities. And checks her own bandages. “We’re not in danger here, it looks like. My samples will keep, our wounds will keep. From what Shepherd said, the sentry ship patrols don’t come close enough to this system to detect us. And we’d get a call if there was an emergency on Olkarion, yes?”

Keith nods. “Of course. It’s not a huge risk. But what do we stand to gain?”

Pidge keeps sorting, chewing her lip. “Satisfying my curiosity. Green wants to, I think. But I get what you’re saying. We don’t know what this seed is, or whether we’ll ever be able to get what we came for. Still…Shepherd is honestly one of the most advanced creations I’ve ever seen. I’m not just being a dweeb. I mean, I am. A dweeb. But still. If this seed, or whatever else we can find in what’s left of the Belt, is even another small piece of what this civilization created…we could learn so much. The Coalition could gain so much. Even if it’s literally just a seed vault, then that could lead us right to what we’re looking for, and possibly a lot more. Dalteri bio-engineering was incredibly intricate and flexible. A seed vault could be anything from a weapons cache to something that could help with the infrastructure problems a lot of the liberated Coalition worlds are having.”

Keith’s quiet for a moment, then says, “We’ve got one day of rations. Plus…” He looks at the pile of fruit Pidge has rolled up into the lion. “Shepherd said that was safe for both of us?”

“Yeah. She’s got an index of everything on that planet down to the organic volatiles, and if she wanted to kill us, she wouldn’t have to lie to us about fruit.”

“She made that clear,” Keith says, a little darkly, and then hooks one over with his toe to sample it. “Hm. Kind of starfruity. All right. We’ll rest here for the night, then fly into the Belt tomorrow and take the day. I want to get back to Olkarion by tomorrow night so we can get patched up and take a real shower.”

Pidge wrinkles her nose. “That raises another strategic concern. You’re going to have to smell me for another day and that might prove fatal.”

“I spent two years on a whale without soap. I’ll live.”

“Oh, I remember.” She wrinkles her nose. “I’m shocked Black let you back into the cockpit smelling like that, I thought she had taste.”

“Well, Black was biased,” Keith says, with an oddly distant and faint smile. Right. Shiro had kind of been _in_ Black right then. “So. You okay with leaving tomorrow night?”

“Yeah. I can live with that.” She cracks her knuckles. “I’ll just have to find everything I need from an entire fallen civilization in a day. No biggie. Oh, give me your helmet, I should repair that before I crash. And patch our undersuits. In case we do EVAs.”

Keith almost cracks a smile. “Sounds like a breeze for you.”

 

❧

 

The lion’s bunks are small, but comfortable and familiar, and Pidge sleeps like a log. At least until she wakes up at an hour that’s abominable even for her with her stomach trying to claw its way out of her mouth.

Right. No dinner in all the excitement.

Keith must have had about the same problem, because she finds him in the cockpit hunched over a bunch of large meaty space grapes, eyes flashing like a cat’s in the dim light.

“Whoa,” says Pidge, picking up something large and solid looking. “You have laser eyes.”

Keith blinks. “Right. Yeah. Apparently that’s a thing.”

“How did nobody ever notice you were an alien again?” Pidge says, flumping down half asleep with no better a plan of attack than gnawing.

“The eyeshine’s new. Ish. My mother said some Galra stuff might start showing a little more as I age.” He’s quiet for a long moment, demolishing at least six golf-ball sized grapes before he says, voice small, “Shiro said that my eyes turned yellow for a bit. When I was fighting. And my teeth were sharper, and I was stronger. Just for a bit.”

Pidge pauses in her gnawing with a mouth full of woody skin. There’s juicy flesh _somewhere_ under there, now she’s just tearing her way down to it with her teeth. “Sho yura.” She frees herself enough to talk. “So you’re a Galra werewolf.”

“I guess?”

“That’s kind of…” She picks at the woody skin with her blunt fingernails, nerd-sniped. “ _How_. Like gradual change is one thing, maybe…okay, why am I asking, I don’t understand Galra genetics. How does the same species have both fur and scales.”

“Ask Krolia, maybe,” Keith offers, and inhales another grape. “She said something about Galra mothers and …phenotypes, I think that was it, that I still don’t actually get.”

“Oh, I will.” Pidge goes back to teeth-husking for a bit. Keith pauses and taps the hilt of his knife like it’s an offer. Wordless, grateful, Pidge hands her fruit over and lets Keith strip it down to edible innards with a few deft strokes. “You call her by her name sometimes. Instead of mom or something.”

Keith pauses, then licks the juice off the blade. “I guess.” She grabs her fruit and starts inhaling. “She left when I was a baby,” Keith says. “So I never knew her when I was little. She’s…incredibly important to me. Meeting her changed my life.”

“You seem more.” Pidge pauses for another bite, juice dripping down her chin, not giving a single fuck. “Steady, I guess?”

“I know who I am now. But I met her as an adult. As…well, something like an equal. I heard somebody say once that if you’re really lucky, you become friends with your parents once you grow up. I guess we kind of jumped straight there.”

“I think they were right. Whoever said that. More or less.” She’s quiet for a moment, absorbing sugar and thinking, inevitably, of her own parents. “Matt…was pretty my only friend when I was a kid. Then I met you guys. And now…”

“Now you just made friends with a planet,” Keith says. “I think you’re doing okay.”

“Did meeting your mom make you sappier?” Pidge asks, because it’s easier than admitting how many feelings that gave her.

Keith blinks. “No? She’s about the least sappy person in the universe.”

“Then why are you sappy.”

“I’m not sappy,” Keith mumbles. “How am I sappy? Blame Shiro, he’s the only way I could be sappy.”

Pidge laughs and just about inhales fruit juice for her trouble. “Yeah, he can be sappy. In, like, the Shiro way.” Guilt pangs in her gut along with hunger as she finishes the fruit she’s working on, reaches for another. This one’s more like an orange, and she busies herself peeling it, head bowed.

“Pidge…?” Keith asks softly.

She bites her lip for a moment, hands stilling. “Look…if I owe you an apology about Shiro…it’s not about the program.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” Keith says, with care. “Sure, Haggar owes me an apology, ideally by dying, but I’m not angry at you guys. I promise.”

Pidge studies him for a moment, slowly peeling back another bit of rind. “You’re. Worried that we think that?”

“Well. Yeah. I don’t _want_ to be an asshole with anger issues. I’ve never liked that about myself. I don’t care if my enemies are scared of me, but…”

“I don’t think you’re angry with me. Not anymore.” More rind. She curls up a little, getting comfortable. “I just…wanted to say it because it was bothering me, I guess.”

“Oh.” Keith relaxes a touch. “That’s fine, then.”

“It was…not long before you got back. When we were working with Lotor and things were weird all around. We had to do emergency repairs to this radiation shielding station, and his arm was the only power source we could use for the generator, so I was down there with him as everyone else put the shield back together…”

 

❧

 

In the morning, Pidge makes a quick stop planetside to grab more fruit. Like a crateful or two, because that stuff is good, and nutritious, and Hunk is gonna flip. She also asks for a map of the Belt, but Shepherd’s answer to that is, _I could give you a map of the mass and dimensions, to the initeeth, but your Lion knows the rest far better than I._

“Yeah, but…”

_Do not get too used to easy successes. May you flourish, Pidge. I will see you when I next wake._

“Okay.” Pidge reaches out to touch one of the Shepherd’s faces, warm living metal-wood pulsing softly under her bare palm. “See you.”

Not that it doesn’t eat at her as she shoves her crates of fruit up Green’s ramp, as she and Keith bound up to escape velocity. Easy successes! Finding Matt, getting Dad back safe? None of her work with Voltron had been easy.

Keith’s settled into her passenger seat. “Do you have any idea where to start?”

“Nope. Shepherd pretty much told me to ask Green.” She squeezes a control bar. “Hey, Green. We don’t have long here, and we’re looking for something Trigel was working on. Do you remember where she lived?”

Green is silent, uncharacteristically so. Then turns a lazy half-roll and rises.

“Okay you’re driving now,” Pidge says, only slightly taken aback. Green’s not heading for the asteroid belt. Instead she’s climbing above the orbital plane of the system. _High_ above. “What are you…”

“Can you screen out the suns so we can see better?” Keith asks, sounding thoughtful.

Green obliges, replacing them with simple outlines on her monitors, and drifts up a couple thousand more meters. The entire Dalterion Belt fills the viewscreen. Or the husks of it. Pidge realizes she’s patting the console.

“There’s a pattern,” Keith says, and Pidge blinks back at him. “The way the big pieces and small pieces are spaced. Like a braid.”

“Whoa. Through the entire belt?” Pidge stares. “That’s…I suppose that makes sense actually. If it was designed with three Shepherds to maintain such a dense asteroid belt in a relatively close orbit, there would be interference patterns between the gravity waves. Shepherd must have been working really hard to maintain this orbital pattern by itself…sleeping my ass.”

“Maybe if your brain is the size of a planet parts of it can sleep?” Keith doesn’t entirely sound like he believes it either.

“Maybe. Okay. So what are we…” Pidge stalls out for a moment, because part of her only-skull-sized brain has been wondering why they’d bother maintaining a close orbit like that anyway. And the realization hits her like lightning. She jitters. “Solar energy. It’s a Dyson swarm. Holy quiznak.”

“What.”

“Dyson swarm, single orbital plane Dyson swarm, it’s the simplest version of the—okay, Dyson sphere is at least the Earth name for a theoretical superconstruct that encompasses an entire star.” Pidge turns her chair for a moment, hands flying up to gesture, talking so fast she nearly trips over her tongue. “Dyson after Freeman Dyson, theoretical physicist, the idea started in sci-fi novels, he hated that it was named after him, anyway. Because once you’re building a galactic civilization, your biggest concern is energy, yeah? Like why the Galra are so dependent on quintessence. And stars give off absolutely tremendous amounts of radiant energy, we’re talking yotawatts, but virtually all of it just goes off into space. So the idea is you build a large construct or series of constructs around a star that harvest energy in a network. A ring for a small amount of energy that’s still way more than you can get with a planet or a single power station. A network for more. A solid sphere for literally all of it, that’s _entirely_ theoretical and gravitationally complex, but even a ring like this captures more than enough energy to run an advanced civilization…”

She trails off, because Keith’s face has gone blank.

“We’re officially friends now but I’m still the stupid friend,” Keith says.

“You’re not _stupid_ , jeez.” She stops for a moment, breathes, and okay, she’s maybe still a _little_ bit overexcited, because Dyson constructs may have kind of been a thing of hers when she was eight and she hasn’t seen one in space in all these months. “More surface that gets sunlight than a planet, farm a ton of solar energy, that’s why they kept it closer to the sun and in tighter formation than an asteroid belt would normally be.”

“Okay,” says Keith, like he’s at least mostly got that.

“Still doesn’t answer the question of why terraform and live on the belt itself and not just use it as a power station and live on the planets, that had to have been a lot of extra work…”

“There’s a break in the pattern,” Keith says.

Pidge blinks back at the screen.

“Like a knot. There. Look left from the gap between the suns.”

It takes her a moment to spot it. But Keith’s right: instead of the cluster of medium-sized asteroids she’d expect, there’s nothing. Almost nothing. A star blinks as Green drifts and everything moves, and she realizes there must be something there, almost too small to see.

Green rumbles.

“You could have just told me,” Pidge says, slightly petulant.

“Sure, but then you wouldn’t get to freak out about Dyson things.” Keith almost smiles. “She knows you, after all.”

 

❧

 

The tiny out-of-place thing Green hovers next to turns out to be a small, dense metallic asteroid. Small like only a few meters, and dense enough that their boots drag right down to it once they slide out into the weightless silence of space. It’s nickel-iron, so they can magnetize to it easily.

It’s still a little surreal. They’re standing like the hands of a clock. To either side, the closest pieces of the Dalterion Belt loom, slowly spinning black chunks in their orbital braid, lifeless. Green hangs against the void behind them, yellow eyes unreadable and paws dangling as she floats in the ruins of her old home. Before them, the two suns burn, and Pidge darkens the visor of her helmet a touch.

Keith looks…haunted.

“Keith…?”

“This place…” He shakes himself a little, refocuses. Takes one step which drops him down to six-o-clock. “I remember when Hunk and I went to the weblum. It was feeding in this drift of dead, broken-up planets. More than we’d expected. And they felt…like this. From what we learned later, I think they’d been hit with the komar.”

Pidge shivers. _Nobody_ had a good time floating dead in space in the middle of a huge firefight that day. “But the komar’s a recent development. Like since we’ve been Voltron.” She looks down at her feet, demagnetizing one boot to tap her toe.

There’s writing under her boots.

“Keith—look down.”

There’s a moment of silence from the other side of the tiny ball of metal, then Keith says, “Oh. Can you translate it?”

“Working on it…” Pidge brings up her wrist computer, starts pacing the entire asteroid to scan it. “Good thing Shepherd gave me her translation databases for the Dalteri language.” The text runs in bands, coiling, branching. Her computer hums for a bit, then presents it as:

_This monument is formed from a drop of the core of the Planet Dalterion, frozen in space as it shattered at the hands of her own people._

_In the development of their first planetary bio-computer, the Dalteri allowed their innovation to outstrip their wisdom. They simplified complexity. They failed to comprehend an emergent factor._

_The planetary bio-computer weakened Dalterion’s structural integrity. Gravitational specialists were not consulted, as in that time the disciplines of science were highly divided and their interactions not taken into account. Those who gave warning were ignored, told that their projections were fear-mongering. Hubris and ignorance held until it was too late._

_We remember the 15,000 years of our civilization’s tangible history lost in the planetary collapse._

_We remember the 1,265,796,451 sentient lives lost in the unfinished evacuation._

_We remember the estimated 2,500,000 unique species lost without genetic sequencing or transplant._

_We the Dalteri are sworn to life in all its dynamic complexity. The untimely destruction of our home world is our greatest crime. But we will not abandon her, not will we turn our backs on our mistakes. So we have chosen to rebuild here, to form the bones of our world into a girdle of green jewels, so that we may never forget to temper our innovation with wisdom, to account for complexity and emergence, and to unite our disciplines in collaboration._

_Child of the Dalterion Belt who travels here, as every child has before you and every child will until entropy consumes us: may you remember this pilgrimage, may you drink deep of the knowledge of your ancestors, and may you flourish as a light to this world._

Silence hangs long after they finish reading.

Pidge drops to one knee and does a deep scan.

“It’s older than Shepherd.” Her voice feels tight. “Maybe six or seven millennia before Trigel’s day. There’s…there’s information in the core. Fossilized DNA storage, high-density, low decay. Pictures, I think, and all kinds of data, and names, and memorials…”

Keith’s hand lands on her shoulder, a little hesitant.

“I’m fine,” Pidge lies through her teeth. This is embarrassing. She’d been a mess when Granddad had taken them all to the holocaust museum when she was little, and then Matt’s grave, and…

Keith squeezes her shoulder.

“Keith,” Pidge croaks. “In Green, in a cargo bin next to my bunk, there should be five or six blank backup hard drives. They’re the blue boxy things like yea big.” She gestures. “And bring one of the five-strand red cables. I _think_ I’ll be able to fit the archive on all five of them, and it’s gonna take the rest of the day to copy, but. Just in case. If the Galra suddenly find this place again or something…”

“Yeah,” Keith says, and kicks off to float back to Green.

 

❧

 

It takes Pidge about half an hour to coax the copy into running at a decent speed, and they wind up having to leave one of their wrist coms—Keith volunteers—to serve as an interface, and by then most of her errant face-leaking has faded away in data-wrangling frustrations and time. They can pick it up on their way out, she assures him. It and the archive.

Once they take off again, jetting slowly through the hollow black remains of the girdle of green jewels, there’s a grim silence in Green’s cockpit. Until Pidge takes off her helmet for a moment to rub her eyes, scrub her hands through her sweaty hair, and prop her elbows on her knees. “Okay. Focus, Holt.”

“Whatever we’re looking for,” Keith says carefully, “Trigel was working on it. Does your lion know where in the Belt she lived, or where she might have been working on a major project?”

Pidge reaches for a control bar. “Hey, girl. I know it’s gonna hurt to go back, but we don’t have much time. Can you take us to Trigel’s place?”

Green’s silent for a moment, then pops up a map of the Belt. Highlights one small asteroid, a little slowly.

Pidge squeezes the bar. And kicks her into gear.

 

❧

 

From the lion, this asteroid doesn’t look much different from all the rest. Black and burnt-out.

Pidge pops her helmet back on her head and stands. Grunts. Takes another dose of painkillers.

Together they drift down to the surface.

It’s desolate. Everything’s covered in a layer of strange dust, thick and black and sticky, and it’s so pervasive that Pidge scans it out of curiosity. And pales.

Carbon compounds. Amino acids. Pidge has to admit, the only other time she’s ever felt vaguely sick from staring at a chemical model was Hunk’s analysis of Nacxela’s core.

“It’s…life. All the building blocks of life, chemically, but taken apart.”

Keith crouches, touches it with care. “Like…something ripped the quintessence out?”

“Yeah. Probably. Like that.” Pidge stands for a moment, breath echoing in her helmet, and turns a circle to take in the area. It’s a dizzying view. The rest of the Belt climbs up and over the sky, like a rocky Milky Way. If all those boulders were alive, bristling with civilization, passing power between them…god, it must have been spectacular. Now it’s just eerie. Mixed sunlight a great wash, leaving double shadows crisp upon the coal-black grave dirt.

“Might’ve been buildings over there,” Keith says, pointing. It’s a cluster of strange, arching, skeletal metallic shapes.

“Might’ve been.” Pidge trudges, trying not to think about what she’s squishing under her boots, and Keith falls into step with her. No jungle to bushwhack here. They can just walk, elbow to elbow, but the conversation has dried up. Too morbid.

“I’d expect them to be more intact,” Keith says eventually as they draw closer. “Things don’t decay with no atmosphere.”

“Yeah.” Pidge rakes her light over a towering, lace-thin coil of metal, gridded like leaf veins. “I think they are, though. The Dalteri did so much with techno-organics. Imagine this was something like the Olkari forest-city? It’s laced through with metals and circuits, but most of the bulk is biological. And if everything biological melted away…”

“Ah,” Keith says, and falls silent again as they start picking their way through. Some bits of metal have fallen with nothing to support them. There are these vaguely reddish structures like giant skeletal flowers lying crumpled in the protein-soup dirt, some with glassy disks still glinting in their centers. “What are you scanning for?” he asks as she pulls up her wrist com.

“Energy signatures. Data archives. Anything I can get. I don’t even know what I’m looking for. Shepherd called it a seed, but nothing organic could’ve survived here…wait a minute.” She paces closer to one of the flowers. “Those contain data.” She crouches, brushes one clean with her fingertips, or at least cleaner. “I think they were holo-cameras. Held in a flower, but almost entirely inorganic.”

“Can you read them without a power source?”

“i…think so. They’re not locked up the way Galra computers are when they’re unpowered, and I might be able to link them to…” She frowns for a moment, cycling through connection algorithms. “There! I think they have a networked directory. Like they’re all flowers off the same root or something.” She opens it up, taps her toe in her boot as the translator chews away and renders the data structure. “That’s odd…”

“What?”

“It’s not like a raw stream of surveillance footage or something. It’s tagged and organized. By the system itself, I think.”

“Tagged like how?”

“Messages to send. Messages received. Deleted by order of Scientist-Premiere. Most precious memories.” She stares at the last for a moment before tapping on it.

Light blooms off her wrist.

It’s decently preserved. Patches of static, the occasional skip, but it’s traced in color, a fine enough resolution to make out a towering, flourishing building of living wood, spilling life from every surface. Like the Olkari forest-city, in fact. Grander. The holo-flowers bloom, turning softly in the wind. Above the castle, the sparkling green glory of the Dalterion Belt stretches overhead, lit by twin suns in a pink-purple sky.

For a moment, this particular holo-flower seems to be focused on an empty garden. It’s a neatly trimmed patch, vines growing in oddly controlled geometries, a twisting knot. Two tall, blooming plants flourish. Where a third might be, there’s a fresh-dug hole.

Then a woman steps into the frame, balancing a heavy flowerpot on her hip, sets it next to the hole, and goes to crouch next to one of the tall plants.

“Alfor,” she says quietly. “Here I am again. Twenty years since we destroyed Daibazaal. Eleven since Altea finally gave in. Sometimes I can’t believe it’s been that long. Twenty years at war.”

She busies herself for a moment, plucking away dead flowers around the bright and elegant red ones, picking a few weeds from the roots.

“Still no sign of the lions in Zarkon’s ranks.” She snorts softly, wry. “I’ll still never forgive you for sending my lady away, you know. But at least it worked. Twenty years and he hasn’t found them.” She sighs and pats a broad leaf. “You tried. You meant only the best. I know.”

She scoots over, tweaking one of the long, coiling stamens from the big blue flowers on the second. “Oh, Blaytz. I’m starting to think I owe you a chance to say I told you so. Even if that would give you a swelled head.” She tends it carefully, changes out a beautiful glass bulb that keeps it well watered. “Maybe if we’d all committed as hard as you did to protecting Altea, we could have broken the Galra then. But Gyrgan and I put our energy into our own defenses, and you said we were being paranoid and Zarkon would burn out once he threw down with Alfor, and…and you lost most of your fleet at Altea, and Nalquod went down like a house of cards in a year.” Her jaw tightens. “Who knows, maybe I’ll join you soon and we can duke out whose fault that was when we’re stardust.”

There’s silence then. The video skips a little. She’s transplanting what’s in the pot. Doing something around its base with a small glowing thing once she has it planted, and it stirs, unfurls a cascade of yellow flowers.

“Presgiterai,” she says. “Your favorite.”

She wipes her hands clean.

“This one’s for you, Gyrgan. I know I don’t have the ear of the gods of Rygnirath. I hope they’re treating you well up there. I should have.” She stops, ears flicking back, and scrubs at her eyes. “I couldn’t…”

She falls silent. Fluffs one of the cascade of flowers. Punches the ground, once, hard. “ _Damn_ Alfor for sending the lions away. If I’d had my lady with me, I could have done so much more. I don’t think I ever told even you how much she’s capable of. Even a handful of years more and I could have transplanted what I needed, wrapped the full power of the Dalterion Belt around Rygnirath, made a stand together. You gave us so much over the years, you shou—”

Her voice cracks. She breathes deep once, twice.

“You shouldn’t have had to die alone. You of all people. I told you to call me when they broke your lines and you— _damn_ it, Gyrgan…”

She loses it for a moment, screaming into her hands, alone with her flowers, her holo-camera tree watching silently and filing it away with love.

“You made them pay in blood for every kilometer of space they took,” she says at last, low and grim. “And now I’m the last one left. Well. The last one with a working brain. I don’t know what’s puppeting Zarkon’s corpse yet, but the man died twenty years ago.”

She stands slowly, dusts off her trousers. “Maybe that’s the key. I can play defense ’til the night vines bloom, the Shepherds are already terraformed into killing pits, but if I can cut those strings…” She breathes, wipes her face, paces amongst the three memorials. “I hear morale in his lines is low after they battered themselves against Rygnirath for eight years. And once they get here—it’s about to get a lot lower.”

The hologram flickers out.

“That’s her,” Pidge breathes. “That’s Trigel.”

“Is there more?” Keith asks quietly.

“Yes—yes.” Pidge fumbles, pulls up the next memory, and the next.

 

❧

 

Trige’s inside this time, in some sort of office. Layers upon layers of holo-maps, records, diagrams, almost too thick to parse. She’s slumped in her chair, shadows under her eyes, antennae wilting. “The last cruiser in Zarkon’s second wave went down today. Took a bit of doing to chase it into the Shepherd’s gravity well, but after that.” She mimes a crash with one hand, then sighs. “Some of his individual captains have half a brain, but Zarkon’s fleet command tactics…he’s just throwing his own men into a meat grinder. Wasteful, _wasteful_ idiot. I’d feel sorry for the poor fucks rotting on the Shepherds, but…”

Her fanged lips twist, and she looks at the ceiling. “But nothing. It’s war. I feel like shit. Memory tree, is there any report from any of our agents in Zarkon’s ranks?”

“No,” answers a smooth, melodic voice.

“Not even the basic check-ins?”

“No.”

“ _Damn_ it.” She turns slowly in her chair. “This is embarrassing. We’re _Dalteri_ , I should be able to run circles around the old turtle in covert ops. They must be detecting them somehow, and reliably.” She closes her eyes, murmuring to herself. “I oversaw the gene-sculpting myself. They’re perfectly Galra. The Alteans never had the technology to detect quintessence signatures by species, and I know most of Honerva’s quintessence development was with life extension and energy harnessing…unless she’s screening them out personally? Damn. She could, if something tipped her off. They were supposed to be trying to approach Zarkon only when the two were separated…”

 

❧

 

“It was Honerva who compromised our agents.”

Trigel’s sitting in her memorial garden, not looking at the camera. Not looking at anything. Her voice is low. Numb. The shadows under her eyes have turned to bags, and her ears are flat against her skull.

“And it was Honerva who destroyed nearly half of the Third Shepherd’s mainframe in a single attack. Direct quintessence drain by Altean witchcraft. Deadly to any living thing. She’s found some way to amplify her power. Some pack of constructs that assist her.”

There’s a long, hollow silence.

“We could have held against Zarkon’s tomfoolery for decaphoebs. But this…if I can’t find a way around this, we’ll fall faster than Nalquod.”

 

❧

 

“This is it,” Trigel says quietly. She’s holding a sample dish of black, sticky dirt carefully in both hands. Sets it on her lab table. “This is the residue left after the quintessence drain. If we don’t have a military breakthrough, this is going to be all that’s left of the Belt in a few more quintants.”

She takes a moment, then. The sort of moment spent hiding her face with her ears down. It lasts.

“It’s fertile,” she says, voice a little cracked. “Ironically enough. Raw biomass. Could make amazing compost. I suppose even Honerva’s magical abominations can’t make an end run around the decomposition cycle. Just split it in two. Material and quintessence.” She lifts her chin, jaw tight. “Whatever form a reconstruction takes, this will be the material. And I don’t have long to nail down that form.” She pulls over some sort of scanner. “Well. Constraints dictate innovation. Memory tree, attend: send a message to the sample teams in the fourth sector. Tell them anything they don’t get me in twenty-six vargas will be lost…”

 

❧

 

In the staticky sky, dead black asteroids float in an arc above the great green castle of Trigel’s home. Amongst them are glints of sick purple light, sigils forming a chain of consumption and death.

Trigel stands in front of her castle, armored in graceful swirls of gold, a green half-cape trailing from one shoulder. She wears a helmet that’s barely more than a transparent bubble, an intricate rebreather half-covering her jaw. She carries a viciously sharp polearm that glints with hidden technology. There are bags under her eyes and wrinkles in her head-tails, and she carries herself with bitter pride.

“Honerva,” she says dryly. “You have really let yourself go. Did you forget what a comb was when you died?”

“Spare me your petty jibes,” Haggar grates out. “You are the last Dalteri alive. You lured me here for a last stand hoping to buy time for your evacuation ships. But they’ve already been destroyed.”

Trigel clenches her jaw, doesn’t react. “I had no delusions about those ships slipping the net. Thank you for chasing the distraction. I serve life, Honerva, as you once did before you lost yourself. If you are to drag me into death, I’m taking you with me. And making sure you stay there this time. Without you, Zarkon will overextend his empire and fall. He’s an idiot who threw a hundred and twenty ships down a hole. No, I lured you here to balance the scales.”

“Fool,” Haggar growls, and raises a glowing black hand. “You have no powers that I cannot wither at a touch.”

Trigel bares her teeth, slides one foot back, sets her spear to charge. “Try me, dead bitch.”

The fight is swift. Brutal. Trigel draws first blood, gray on the thick grass. Her armor sluices off black lightning, resists the quintessence drain of Haggar’s attacks.

Yet Haggar strikes the killing blow.

The memory tree’s eye doesn’t leave its master’s body. Lightning burns crackle up her jaw, almost reaching her wide-open eyes. Conducted by her own spear.

Haggar’s curse rises in a sea of crackling shadow, and the last piece of the Dalterion Belt drains into black dust.

 

❧

 

“No,” Pidge croaks. “Why—would she do all that—she can’t have been so stupid to fight with a conductive spear, that can’t have been for nothing—! Why are you showing me this? What was the _point?_ ”

“Pidge,” Keith says quietly. “Maybe it’s…just to remember.”

“It can’t be.” Pidge can’t even scrub her eyes. Not in her helmet. She blinks furiously, hands clenching so hard they hurt. “It _can’t_ be.”

 

❧

 

Haggar leaves.

The shadows stretch over black grave dirt. Trigel’s armor is a faint glint of gold. It protected her body, somehow, from being mulched with the rest. Haggar didn’t even look close enough to notice before she skulked back to her drop ship.

The failing atmosphere boils off in steam.

A pulse of green light runs over the armor.

Her chest heaves.

There’s no sound anymore. Not enough air to conduct it. Breath steams the inside of Trigel’s helmet, once, twice. She winces, ears flat. Sits up slowly. Her right arm seems paralyzed, spear falling from her nerveless fingers.

She smiles. Black and bitter and fierce. Her ears prick. And she reaches into a hidden pouch in her armor with her shaking left hand. Whispers something that can’t be heard, can’t be lip-read with her rebreather in the way.

She pulls out a chunk of green material, glassy-looking, refracting light in strange and complex and coiling ways. It’s maybe six inches long, seed-shaped.

She presses it to her chest.

Her eyes burn yellow. Light flares. Gold and green. The recording bursts in static, flickers. Light drains into the seed. Her own quintessence, every drop.

Trigel’s body drops back into the black soil, lifeless.

 

❧

 

“Where,” Pidge gasps. “Where—where did she—“

Keith is on his feet, looking around at the ruins like he’s trying to map them to their living glory from the holograms, and then he takes off at a jog, heading for a ridge at the edge of the area. Pidge scrambles after him.

“There,” he says, pointing. There’s a little mound in the dirt, maybe a glint of gold.

They drop to their knees. Pidge digs frantically. Keith sweeps the sticky dust aside with his left hand, not straining his right.

They find her spear first, charred. Then her armor, cape melted into dust, sculpted metal and helmet perfectly intact. The body inside is—Pidge can only look for a moment. Nothing but black skin clinging to a skeleton, drained dry and mummified.

The green seed lies on her chest, heavy and bright, her left hand still folded over it.

Pidge reaches for it and realizes her hands are shaking a little.

“I’m glad I got to see you,” she says quietly. “Even for a bit. I’ll do my best to take care of Green for you. A-and this.” She’s quiet for a moment. “Fuck Haggar!” she blurts, fervent. “And fuck Zarkon. He’s dead. Because he was an idiot, you were totally right about that. She’s still around. But we’re going to kick her ass. I promise.”

Trigel’s millennia-dead hand is rigid as stone, and it takes Pidge a long, careful moment to slide the seed free, cupping it with great care in both of hers.

“What is it?” Keith asks slowly.

“I…I don’t know. Quintessence. _Hers._ And…data storage, maybe? A data storage crystal of some kind…”

A shadow falls nearby, and she looks up with a jolt to see Green floating down to land, eye level with the ridge.

Pidge freezes for a moment.

The realization cascades like lightning, like circuits bursting into life, like her mind brushing Green’s on Olkarion.

“Keith,” she blurts, holding out the seed. “Load this into the seed cannon.”

“What,” Keith starts, and reaches for it with both hands and a wince. “Here?”

“I-it _has_ to be here!” She’s tripping over her own tongue with excitement. “Remember what she was saying—compost, material, rebuilding, it can’t sprout anywhere else!” The moment it’s safe in his hands, she bolts for Green, launching herself off the ridge with a pulse of her jump-jets and right into her lion’s open mouth. “Bringing it up now!”

She practically jumps into her seat. Yorak stirs from his doze, ears flicking back in surprise. She closes her eyes for a moment, focuses, calls up the seed cannon with a thrum of power rising around her. Then hears the light thump of Keith landing on her lion’s head.

“Is it in?” she calls over the coms.

“Give me a moment…” A puff of jump-jets. “Okay. I think so.”

Something _clicks_. It’s bone-deep, all around her. Green light rising.

“Yeah. It’s in. Might wanna get off her before I fire.”

“On it,” Keith says, slightly strained. Another thump. Green pulls up a belly camera, shows him safely between her paws.

Pidge pulls the control bar back, sensing power spinning up in Green like she’s never felt before. All the consoles glowing, almost blinding. She has a bare moment of fear. Wonders if Keith’s going to open an empty cockpit after this, again. Wonders if Green can hold her consciousness like Black held Shiro’s. Worse ways to go than becoming a magi-tech robot lion, but _still_.

She thumbs the trigger.

The world goes black.

 

❧

 

Pidge floats in a dark green void.

She’s in her armor when she looks down at herself. Limned in light.

“No,” she breathes. Is she actually… “No. Damn it! I can’t leave Matt and Mom and Dad like this!”

A point of white light sparkles next to her foot. Another a few feet away.

“Hello? Can anyone hear me? Green? Keith?”

Another point of light.

“Trigel?”

Another.

For a moment, she—feels, more than sees, great yellow eyes. A roar. A constellation of green lights: a rotating sphere. It hangs there just long enough for her to register the pattern. A truncated icosahedron. Buckminster fullerine. The perfect carbon sphere.

Then it disappears, and there’s nothing but deep green darkness. No gravity, no up and down, just her and sixty points of white light.

Sixty.

“What is this, a puzzle?” she asks.

No answer.

“Okay. Fine. One buckyball, coming up.”

She can grasp the points of light, she discovers. They’re like marbles in her palm. Some of them seem to move more easily than others, but with some concerted effort in floating, she can start assembling them. Hexagon. Pentagon.

They twitch. React. Collide. Burst apart.

Pidge hisses in frustration. Maybe she got an angle off. She starts again.

They break apart even faster this time.

“Right,” Pidge says, clenching her jaw. “You’re _on._ ”

 

❧

 

After what feels like an hour or two, Pidge is ready to claw off at least one body part with frustration.

It’s not, from what she can remember, a matter of simulating the chemical synthesis of the molecule. Or of assembling around the double bonds in any particular order. Or of geometric accuracy. She’s discovered that she can take notes on the air with her fingertip like it’s a holoscreen, organize them and move them around, which makes it trivial to draft up a bunch of hexagons, once she gets a good circle with her gauntlet for a compass, and assemble an accurate three-dimensional sketch of the truncated icosahedron from there.

“Do not get too used to easy successes,” she mutters. “Shepherd, if this is your fault you’re gonna be friends with Rick Astley for the rest of your days.”

She herds all sixty into a pile, which _also_ makes them vibrate apart, and finally, in sheer annoyance, she draws a large rectangle and labels it THIS IS THE PARTS PILE, NONE OF YOU BASTARDS FIGHT WITH EACH OTHER UNTIL I ACTUALLY START ASSEMBLING YOU, THIS IS JUST FOR OUR MUTUAL CONVENIENCE SO CALM THE HELL DOWN.

To her surprise, it works.

 

❧

 

Telling them in increasingly verbose and creative ways to just make a damn buckyball already, however, is _not_ working, so after she takes a moment to float off and scream into the void, she sits down next to it with grim determination. Well, floats cross-legged. Whatever. It’s the spirit of the thing.

“All right. Hypothesis: each of these elements has arbitrary rules of interaction with other elements that leads to apparently random behavior. For the sake of my sanity, and because I trust my lion to not trap me in hell with a puzzle without a solution, I’m going to assume that these rules are consistent and that with controlled testing, I’ll be able to deduce them.” She grabs a glowing sphere at random and scribbles in the air next to it. “You are now Number 1. Let’s call you Bob. And you,” she grabs a second, “are now Number 2.” The notes stay with their respective elements, at least. “Let’s call you…eh, okay, I’ll name you later. Maybe you’ll be Anti-Bob. Now how do you play together…”

 

❧

 

There are one thousand, seven hundred, and seventy possible combinations of two items out of sixty.

Pidge occasionally has to stop and be disturbed by the fact that she doesn’t seem to feel time passing. Maybe she _is_ dead. But there has to be a point to this goddamn buckyball puzzle. Green _must_ have better ways of entertaining her in the afterlife, right?

“Okay, Number 17, I’m calling you Lance, because you seem to be really attracted to several other elements which then pisses them off.”

Even if she does wind up having to keep a running list of Things A Truncated Icosahedron Might Symbolize So I Can Figure Out Why Green Or Whoever Is Making Me Do This.

“Number 29, you are Matt, because you seem to behave in a pretty reasonable fashion except for randomly bouncing. Why do you bounce, Matt. Why. It keeps scaring off Zarkon.” Zarkon, of course, is Number 11, scared of everything, and named in revenge. She distracts herself for a while by shoving Number 29 at it and giggling fiendishly.

 

❧

 

“Well I am damn well not simplifying complexity,” Pidge mutters, flopping in a pile of one thousand, seven hundred, and seventy note screens about interactions. “Maybe this is actually a database design exercise. Maybe it’s actually unsolvable and the point is organizing information. I’m not hungry.” She lifts an arm experimentally. “I don’t even smell, and I should be reeking by now. I guess this isn’t hell because if it was hell I’d stink as well as being ready to commit murder. Okay. I’ve got to start _somewhere_ , it can arbitrary, which six of you might play nicely as a hexagon…”

She makes a hexagon. She makes a hexagon that she can throw like a frisbee. It’s deeply satisfying.

Now she just needs the other nineteen hexagons. And twelve pentagons. And to make them all play nicely at the edges and vertices.

A test: she notes down the stable hexagon configuration, then reaches for Lance to see if his mild repulsion effect on Spiderman will disrupt the hexagon.

 _Lance_ jitters in her hand, spins violently, and bounces off.

Pidge groans and puts her head between her knees.

“So the _combinations_ have emergent properties. Oh _fuck me_.”

 

❧

 

“Okay,” she tells herself, after a disorganized pile of despairing notes. “Come on. You’re Katie Holt. You _know_ you’re smart. If you can solve this, you can solve anything You just need…color coding, we need color coding. That’s it. I’m referring to myself in the second person _and_ the royal we, I’m going insane.”

A color wheel appears on the back of her hand.

“Aww _yiss!_ ”

 

❧

 

The testing is exhaustive. Weeks could have passed. Months. At least she isn’t really _feeling_ the time, not like this.

Something clicks when the fourth hexagon she’s tested in a row twists apart in her hands. The _pattern’s_ familiar. A sort of shearing.

“Gravity,” she breathes. “It’s a gravity puzzle.” She almost hyperventilates for a moment, as much as she could be said to breathe in this void. “It’s a test. A Dalteri test. It must be. Failure to account for emergent gravitational properties…”

She jolts to her feet, as much as she could be said to stand in this void. Draws what she can remember of the orbital pattern of the Dalterion Belt from memory. Scales that up and leaves it hanging over her workspace.

 

❧

 

She starts to see patterns as she tests.

At first they’re so elusive, nonsensical, that she thinks she’s starting to imagine things in the streams of data. But no, certain apparently disparate elements react in similar ways in similar situations. She starts tagging them with properties in blue. Then purple and red and magenta as she starts to refine what sorts of properties are in play. There are patterns of attraction and repulsion that have nothing to do with the gravitational wave interferences she’s starting to map. And that only exist in some elements. Dizzy with information overload, head swimming with thoughts of their two days on the Shepherd’s world—yesterday, years ago, whichever—she starts to label them as animals. Zarkon becomes _Itsy-Bitsy-Mousy-Wousy_. Lance becomes _Rawr the T-Rex (don’t tell Lance he’ll get a swelled head)._

The she realizes that Matt bounces at every element she’s given an animal tag to, even though they don’t react to it in turn, so for a while Matt is labeled _Five-Year-Old Me At The Zoo?_ , before it gets labeled again as _Decomposition? (sorry, Matt)._

 

❧

 

Her first three attempts to assemble a complete, heavily notated, blindingly colorful gravity-cum-ecology buckyball fall apart, and she actually straight-up cries for a while after the second one goes before she sits down and starts to test out why. It requires killing a few metaphors, relabeling a few points, ultimately realizing that amongst all the mixed metaphors, which pairs combine in double bonds on the molecular model of a buckyball are _also_ important. Some of them get relabeled: she’s particularly fond now of Zarkon the Itsy-Bitsy-Thirsty-Mousy-Wousy Don’t Put Me Too Far From Water. Some of them get most of the text stripped away in favor of big sprawling diagrams of interactions.

Time’s forgotten. Her body’s forgotten. She’s _close_. She can feel it in the crackling of her brain.

About halfway through building her fourth serious attempt, she realizes she has it. Previously mapped stable pentagons and hexagons are slotting in perfectly. She stares at one for a moment, figuring out how to rotate it, but of _course_ , Shiro the large edible herbivore and Allura the soil acidity need to be at opposite sides of the sphere because of the cascade reaction she tracked down last time, so that side goes there, and that means…

She drops the last dozen or so elements into place as easily as winning a game of tic-tac-toe. No other possible solution.

Her notes fall away into sparkling dots. Nothing in the void but her and sixty points of light, rotating in a perfect truncated icosahedron, pulsing softly as she vibrates with clarity and triumph. That was Shepherd’s terminal, she realizes absentmindedly. Of course. A stellated truncated icosahedron. How had she not seen it before?

The sphere lights up green.

The Green Lion fires her seed cannon.

 

❧

 

Something’s nudging Pidge’s hand, something cold and wet and a little squishy.

“Hey, Pidge?” A voice. Keith’s voice? “This…this is amazing. Come look.”

She’s in the Green Lion’s cockpit.

Breathing is suddenly, viscerally, a thing. She feels like she’s made of lead. Something small and heavy lands on her thigh, then her shoulder.

Then Yorak licks her face.

Pidge _squawks_ , suddenly very much awake. “Oh my god Keith. Oh my god. Your wolf’s gonna lick me to death. I’m alive. I’m here. Holy crap. My brain hurts.”

“What’s happened?” Keith asks over the coms, sounding a little more concerned now.

“There was a…security system, I think? Or some sort of test.” Pidge levers herself up, or tries to, given the wolf. Manages to grab one of the half-finished water pouches she’s scattered about. Drinks deep, trying to soothe her pounding head. “A puzzle. About gravitational fields and ecology and emergent complexity and…it was nuts, Keith, I feel like I spent a year solving that thing. At least.”

“The cannon fired maybe a few seconds after I got clear,” Keith says carefully.

“A few seconds,” Pidge echoes in disbelief. “Okay.”

“I…kind of know that feeling.” His voice softens. “Come on out. See what you’ve planted. It’s…beautiful.”

Green is quiet, Pidge realizes. She’s shut down her monitors. She doesn’t feel drained like she did before, and rumbles softly beneath her when she fusses, so Pidge finally manages to pry herself out of the chair. Her leg hurts. She’d kind of forgotten that her leg hurt during all that time-out-of-time, and now a wolf’s sat on it, so it hurts a _lot._

Yorak trots at her side down Green’s open ramp.

Pidge stops at the base of it for a moment, stunned.

The asteroid is alive.

It’s not quite Trigel’s green castle from the holograms: it’s wilder, a mass of flora. And fauna, she realizes, when Yorak’s ears perk up at something scuttling into the undergrowth. A riot of color and life. A low but extant atmosphere catches the light of the twin suns, glowing with thin washes of clouds before it seeps up into starry space and the Belt hanging overhead.

Her wrist com reads livable conditions. No protection needed.

She turns off her faceplate, takes a deep shaky breath of fresh, green-smelling air that only makes her eyes water somewhat. She wonders distantly how the atmosphere is maintained. There must be some sort of magnetic field to attenuate radiation. This must have been engineered, thoroughly, an entire ecosystem to make barren rocks liveable. A lot more moving parts than sixty.

“Yeah,” she whispers. “It’s beautiful.”

 

❧

 

Keith had gone up to the ledge where Trigel’s body still rests, sitting reverently some paces away, and Yorak had bounded up to join him, so there they are, and Pidge honestly isn’t sure she’s ever just sat and basked in nature like this.

It’s…nice. Especially after another slug of antihistamines.

Green has loafed on a relatively bare patch below, eyes glinting. The Belt spins overhead. The world is still growing around them. Slower now. Leaves unfolding. Atmosphere thickening. The refracted double-sunlight paints everything in warm purples.

“Do you think we should bury her?” Pidge asks quietly, after a while.

“I don’t know.” Keith runs fingertips through the grass. “We’d disturb a lot of soil. I don’t know how stable this ecosystem is.”

“Mm.” Pidge looks over her shoulder. There’s a mound of low-running vines already starting to spread over the ancient golden armor. “I guess…she’s where she’d want to be either way.” She’s quiet for a moment, then pulls herself to her feet. “Well. Almost.”

Keith makes a questioning noise and follows her.

Pidge crouches beside Trigel’s body again. The sprouted grass is thick around her, flowers budding green and yellow and white. The seal of her suit isn’t compromised; whatever the material is, it’s not going to be grown into easily, and somehow Pidge isn’t surprised.

“She…gave her quintessence to make all this,” Pidge says quietly. “Every bit. I think…I think she’d want be in the carbon cycle too.”

“You mean…her body?” Keith asks, like he isn’t sure what a carbon cycle is and doesn’t want to ask.

“Yeah.” Pidge reaches for the base of her helmet, forces herself to look at the ancient blackened husk, pauses as she tries to find the seal.

“I think so too,” Keith murmurs. There’s a bare whisper of metal, then he’s pressing the hilt of his knife into her hand.

Pidge nods her thanks, wordless for once, and carefully slips the knife’s edge into the gasket, breaking the seal.

There’s a puff of ten-thousand-year-old air as Trigel’s helmet falls away, stale and dead as the bowels of that Galra cruiser, but washed away quickly on the bright new flowery breeze. Her skull and face crumple down in a way that Pidge really doesn’t want to look at.

Keith squeezes her shoulder as she hands the knife back.

“You are right. She would wish to return to this earth.”

The voice isn’t Keith’s. It’s warm, familiar, and comes from a few feet behind them.

It’s Trigel.

Pidge practically jumps out of her armor.

At first, inanely, she thinks the seed had somehow resurrected her, even though she’d literally just been looking at her mummified body. Then she registers that she can see the horizon through her chest. Then she remembers to breathe again. Keith, at a quick side glance, doesn’t seem much less unnerved as he rolls to his feet, eyes wide.

The Green Lion stirs, head cocked, one paw almost hesitantly reaching forward, and Pidge’s chest aches.

“If you are hearing this,” the transparent figure says, “the Dalterion Belt and all who lived on it have fallen, and you have found and activated this biological archive. I do not know who you are, though I trust that this archive’s security systems have done their part. Though I do know, from the activation path taken, that you are the current Green Paladin.”

Pidge jolts to her feet, staring.

The hologram isn’t one bit as staticky as all the others she’d seen. Pixel-perfect. Trigel wears her armor, green cape fluttering in a gentle simulated breeze, but her helmet and spear are gone. She looks perhaps a little younger, and certainly less tired, ears and antenna standing bright and tall. Her fang-jagged mouth seems to hold a faint smile at its edges now.

“I am an artificial intelligence,” she continues. “I have been given the form and voice of Trigel, the Dalterion Belt’s final Scientist-Premiere and former Green Paladin of Voltron. I am the interface and guardian of this archive. You should be aware that any attempts to bypass my authority could result in the destruction of this archive. I cannot allow the knowledge contained within to fall into the hands of those who would misuse it.”

“I understand,” Pidge says, voice only a little shaky. “You guys have the most advanced organic technology I’ve ever seen. Even if somebody means well, it can…I saw the memorial.”

Trigel nods graciously.

“Hey,” Keith asks from behind them. “Can we pick flowers, or would that mess things up?”

Trigel tilts her head, as if calculating. “Of that species, up to one mature blossom from each plant could be harvested safely at this time. I assume you seek the compound in the stamens?”

Pidge makes a small squeak of surprise, and turns, and sure enough, Keith is crouched in a patch of flowers. Purple-pinkish, elaborately ruffled, dark foliage.

“Yeah,” Keith says.

“That will provide a small but usable amount, provided you distill it within five hours of harvest. Please do not touch any buds. The insects that pollinate that species will mature in sixty-two vargas, at which point those buds will be in full bloom, and all those flowers will be needed.”

Keith nods. “Of course. Thanks.” He carefully selects flowers, cuts them tidily with his blade.

Yorak takes off after a butterfly.

“Hey, you,” Keith says sharply. “No eating anything here.”

“What species is that?” Trigel asks curiously, holographic eyes tracking Yorak’s romp. “I have no record of anything like it.”

“It’s from a _space whale_ ,” Pidge grins. “Get him to tell you all about it, it’s amazing. Complete ecosystem on its back.”

“Oh, man,” Keith groans.

“Hey, you discovered it, you’re the space whale ecologist now. Maybe you should write a book.”

“No. I’m a terrible writer.” He finishes, tucks the knife away, and comes up with his bouquet. “I don’t know if your security systems gave you our names, but I’m Keith, this is Pidge. I fly the Black Lion.”

Trigel studies him for a moment, that catlike smile tugging at her mouth. “Have all the paladins gotten shorter? I must say, that armor doesn’t look very black.”

“I was the Red Paladin. Something happened to our Black Paladin.” A flicker of weary grief runs over his face. “A lot of things happened to our Black Paladin.”

“Did he betray you too?” Trigel asks, almost gently.

“No,” Keith says, almost before she’s finished. “Never. Not Shiro. The Black Lion chose somebody different this time, somebody she could trust. He’s just…been hurt. He can’t fly much right now. So I was next in line.”

“I see.” She acknowledges that with a gracious nod, seeming satisfied. Then refocuses on Pidge, voice turning serious. “Green Paladin Pidge, sower of this seed, fulfiller of Trigel’s wishes: I acknowledge you as the current primary user of this archive and heir to the knowledge of the Dalterion Belt. Do you accept this?”

Pidge feels her mouth go dry. It’s something deeper and heavier than excitement bubbling in her veins now. For a moment, she catches Green’s eyes, bright and intent, behind Trigel’s holographic form. Keith straightens a little, not that he’s really at attention with a handful of flowers and a bandaged side. Even Yorak skitters up and sits with them, tail swishing in the grass, tongue lolling in a dog grin.

Pidge swallows and draws herself up. “Yes. I accept. And it is my honor.”

 

❧

 

[ ](http://technofortomcats.net/artwork/gardens_unmarked.jpg)

_“Of all the gardens I have ever gazed at”_    ❧    _[kyuofcosmic](http://kyuofcosmic.tumblr.com)_

**Author's Note:**

> I has a [tumblr](http://letterblade.tumblr.com)


End file.
